Education Committee — hearing of 8 July 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 00:30

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?

00:30 - 02:43

Speaker 5

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? That's 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'd 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, so 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. On Best Start family hubs and restoring family support, it's been a huge privilege to work on restoring family services after Sure Start was so cruelly cut by the Conservative government. And I'm pleased to report that there is now at least one Best Start family hub in every local authority area and we're going to get to 3,000 hubs and network sites by the end of the Parliament, which makes a huge difference for families in their community, on their doorstep, a place where they can come for connection, a cup of tea, a conversation, free stay and play and a great opportunity for those families. And we aren't just opening buildings, but transforming the system too, so connecting services together, involving PVIs, schools, libraries, voluntary groups to take family support to where people are.

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