Our team was commissioned by Nesta to estimate the level of public spending on children in England aged under 5, assembling and combining data on welfare, healthcare, children’s services and social care, and childcare. We tracked how this has changed since 2010, and we disaggregated results across children from more or less disadvantaged backgrounds and by whether the beneficiaries are aged 0-1 or 2-4.

We conducted a scoping exercise to understand the policy context and identify spending items related to children in the early years. We gathered the latest data to calculate total spending, apportioning spending to exclude children over 5. For age breakdowns, we used data on service utilisation by age. For income distribution in most areas, we relied on public data by income decile. However, for children's services, we matched local authority income averages to their spending on social care, allowing us to create an income distribution aggregated into deciles.

Our findings suggest that there has been overall stability in early years spending since 2010, but this masks a considerable shift in the composition of this spending, with large cuts to welfare and to children’s services (in particular, Sure Start centres) alongside increases in free childcare entitlements and healthcare spending. These shifts suggest that public spending on the early years has become less targeted to lower income families over time.

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