Early Years Census 2025: Supporting Local Authority Compliance and Data Quality

The census covers children aged 9 months to 4 years receiving funded early education in private, voluntary, and independent (PVI) settings within your authority. It's important to note that the EYC excludes children in maintained nursery schools and classes, which are covered separately by the School Census. As the local authority, you have a statutory duty to ensure accurate and timely data collection from all PVI providers delivering funded places. 

The census data directly informs funding allocations to your authority and how you distribute funding to providers, making accuracy and completeness essential for financial planning and statutory compliance. 

The EYC captures detailed information across three key areas that paint a comprehensive picture of early years provision within your authority. First, establishment-level data includes information about each PVI setting, covering setting characteristics and registration details, staff information including qualifications and roles, Ofsted registration and inspection details, and opening hours and term patterns. This foundational information helps you and the DfE understand the landscape of early years provision and assess sufficiency. 

Second, child-level data is collected for each child receiving funded education. Providers must submit demographics such as name, date of birth, gender, and ethnicity, along with special educational needs (SEN) status and primary need type where applicable.  

Third, funding details represent a particularly critical aspect of the census given recent policy changes. This includes the universal entitlement of 15 hours for eligible 3 and 4-year-olds, 15 additional support hours for 2-year-olds, extended hours providing an additional 15 hours for eligible working parents, and the expanded entitlement offering up to 30 hours for eligible 2-year-olds from September 2024 and eligible children from 9 months from September 2025. 

The landscape of early years funding is evolving rapidly, with significant implications for local authority data management. From September 2025, the government's expanded entitlement means more families will be eligible for funded childcare from when their child is just 9 months old. This represents a significant expansion of the current scheme and will affect the number of children included in census returns across your authority, the complexity of tracking different funding streams, the administrative burden on both your team and provider settings, and your funding calculations and financial forecasting. 

Understanding these changes now will help you prepare your systems, support providers with increased data requirements, and ensure accurate funding distribution in future census cycles. 

Getting Early Years Census submissions right isn't just about compliance – it has real consequences for your authority across multiple areas. From a financial perspective, census data directly influences the funding you receive from central government and how you allocate resources to providers.

Inaccurate or incomplete submissions can result in funding discrepancies affecting your budget, cash flow challenges across the sector, disputes with providers, retrospective adjustments that are difficult to manage, and potential clawback from central government. 

As a statutory data collection, the regulatory requirements are equally important. Failure to ensure accurate EYC data can affect your authority's relationship with the DfE, create compliance issues, impact your ability to demonstrate sufficiency duty fulfillment, and potentially damage your authority's reputation. Beyond these immediate concerns, census data also serves broader strategic purposes by informing your sufficiency planning and place allocation decisions, supporting workforce development strategies, enabling you to identify gaps in provision or support needs, and contributing to sector-wide analysis that informs government policy. 

Many local authorities struggle with the EYC collection and validation process due to a range of interconnected challenges. Coordinating data collection from multiple providers across your area creates significant administrative burden, particularly when providers use different systems or manual processes.

This results in inconsistent data formats requiring extensive cleaning and standardisation, delayed submissions that compress validation timelines, incomplete provider returns necessitating follow-up, and last-minute verification processes that increase pressure on your early years team. 

Data quality issues compound these challenges at the local authority level, with common problems including incomplete or inconsistent submissions from PVI settings, missing child-level data required for statutory returns, outdated provider contact information that hampers verification, and discrepancies in funded hours calculations that create funding allocation challenges. These issues not only affect census accuracy and statutory reporting but can have ongoing implications for strategic planning, budget management, and your ability to fulfill your sufficiency duty effectively. 

Staff capacity presents another significant challenge. The administrative burden falls heavily on early years teams, with officers often spending weeks managing the census process, validating provider submissions, and resolving data queries instead of focusing on strategic planning and provider support. This diversion of resources during an already busy period can impact the quality of support available to the sector. 

The complexity increases further when managing multiple funding streams. Tracking which children across your entire provider base qualify for universal entitlement, extended hours, 2-year-old funding, and the new expanded entitlement requires robust systems and constant oversight. Without effective data management infrastructure, this complexity multiplies errors and delays. 

Success with the Early Years Census requires year-round strategic planning and provider engagement. Throughout the year, your authority should maintain regular communication with PVI providers about data quality expectations, provide training and guidance on census requirements and best practice, monitor provider data management capabilities and offer support where needed, maintain up-to-date provider contact information and registration details, and establish clear processes for data submission, validation, and query resolution. 

During the autumn term, preparation should intensify. This is the time to review your data collection and validation processes to identify bottlenecks, issue updated guidance to providers reflecting any changes to requirements, conduct provider briefings or webinars to ensure sector understanding, perform early data quality checks to identify potential issues before the official census window, and confirm technical arrangements for data submission and processing. 

When January arrives, ensure adequate time for provider support and data validation. Implement a structured validation process to catch errors early, maintain clear communication channels for provider queries, track submission progress across your provider base, escalate issues promptly when providers are non-compliant, and maintain audit trails of all submissions and amendments for regulatory purposes. 

Access early years management systems enable local authorities to streamline the entire census process from a centralised platform. Provider portal functionality allows PVI settings to submit data directly through secure online portals, automated validation catches errors at the point of submission before data reaches your team and bulk processing tools enable efficient handling of data from multiple settings simultaneously. 

The system includes built-in compliance features to ensure your authority remains census-ready. Pre-configured templates aligned with DfE requirements are updated automatically when requirements change, validation rules enforce data quality standards consistently across all submissions, audit trails document all submissions and amendments for transparency and regulatory purposes, and historical data enables year-on-year comparison and trend analysis for strategic planning. 

While census compliance is crucial, Access Synergy  supports local authorities throughout the year with capabilities that enhance strategic early years management. Sufficiency planning tools enable you to analyse provision patterns, identify gaps, and forecast future demand based on demographic data. Provider relationship management functionality helps you maintain communication, track quality ratings, coordinate training, and manage contracts effectively. 

Comprehensive reporting and analytics provide insights across your entire early years sector, supporting data-led decision-making, evidencing statutory duty fulfillment to regulators and scrutiny panels, and demonstrating outcomes to government and local stakeholders. These capabilities transform your early years service from reactive administration to proactive strategic leadership. 

As the early years sector evolves, data requirements will become more sophisticated, and local authorities need systems that can adapt. The expansion of funded childcare to younger age groups signals the government's continued focus on this critical area and suggests that data requirements will become more detailed and complex over time. 

Local authorities that invest in robust data management infrastructure now will be better positioned to adapt to future policy changes, manage increased numbers of eligible children as entitlement expands, coordinate more complex funding arrangements as new schemes are introduced, demonstrate sufficiency and quality outcomes in increasingly sophisticated ways, and use evidence to drive sector improvement and strategic investment. 

The trajectory is clear: local authorities will face increasing expectations around data quality, transparency, and the ability to demonstrate impact. By establishing strong systems and processes now, you can turn this challenge into an opportunity to strengthen your strategic capacity and enhance early years outcomes across your area.