To ask the Minister of Education to detail the amount of funding provided to statutory nursery settings for places for non-target age children, in each of the last five academic years.

The table below provides data on the number of penultimate age children that obtained a funded pre-school education place in a statutory pre-school setting in each of the last five academic years.

Source: NI school census

All grant aided schools are funded under the Common Funding Scheme. The Common Funding Formula (CFF) is the Department’s mechanism for allocating budgets to schools funded through Local Management of Schools arrangements. A school’s CFF allocation is determined by both the quantum of funding available to the Aggregated Schools Budget and a combination of the school’s overall enrolment, the differentiated needs of its pupils and the school’s characteristics.

Pupils that attend a statutory nursery school or nursery unit attract the same level of funding depending on the hours of attendance (part time/full-time), irrespective of age. It is not possible to disaggregate the funding attributable to individual pupils from the total funding allocated to individual schools. The table below provides details of the CFF Age Weighted Pupil Unit (AWPU) funding for nursery schools and units for each of the last five financial years, for illustrative purposes.

The cost attributable to penultimate age pupils attending statutory nursery settings has to be considered in the context of the financial sustainability of these schools which will incur the staffing and running costs irrespective of pupil enrolments.

The draft Early Learning and Childcare Strategy, which is currently out for public consultation, includes an action to establish a programme specifically for two year olds and an action to remove the current legislation that places a duty on statutory pre-school providers to admit penultimate aged children.