Education Committee
8 July 2026
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Education Committee Actual start House of Commons
15:24 - 15:50
Speaker 1
Order, order. Welcome to this oral evidence session of the Education Select Committee this morning. This is the final evidence session in the committee's inquiry on the early years, and we are pleased to welcome Minister Olivia Bailey to answer questions from the committee this morning. Thank you very much for being here, Minister. Would you like to introduce yourself and your official who's with us today and say anything by way of opening remarks that you'd like to?
15:50 - 17:14
Speaker 2
Thank you very much, Chair, and it's a real great pleasure to be here, and thank you for this inquiry, which I'm really looking forward to reading the outcome of. I'm here with Chris Armstrong-Stacey, who is Director of Early Years in the Department for Education. Have I mangled your job title? Is that correct? Very good.
So thank you for the opportunity to say a few brief opening remarks. It's great that we're actually meeting today almost exactly a year since we published the Best Start in Life strategy, a year ago yesterday.
And I thought it would be a good opportunity just to reflect on some of the things I think we've achieved in that year briefly at the outset. So firstly, on childcare and early education, the record expansion of the entitlement has gone very well this year, and we've now got record numbers of children in early education and making huge savings for families as well, around £8,000 for working families, which is making a big difference to family finances. We've also taken action to try and make sure that we've got places where they're needed. So we've got early years teacher incentives, for example, in more disadvantaged areas, school-based nurseries. We've taken action to increase quality, doubling the number of stronger practice hubs, funding evidence-based interventions like NELI, and we've got a real focus on reception year as well, which is so important as we drive towards our target of 75% good level of development by the end of the Parliament.
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