Skip to main content

Nursery Providers

Volume 455: debated on Tuesday 9 January 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many mainstream nursery providers there were in the Sunderland city council area in (a) 1997 and (b) 2005. (110059)

Information is not collected in the form requested.

The available information on child care providers is shown in tables 1 and 2.

Table 1: Number1 of registered child care providers for children under eight years of age by type—Sunderland local authority area—position at 31 March 2005

Type of care

2005

Full day care

50

Sessional day care

2

Child minders

300

Out of school day care

30

Crèche day care

20

1 Figures are rounded to the nearest 10 if under 100, and to the nearest 100 if over 100.

2 Indicates 1 or more, but less than 5.

Source:

Ofsted

Table 2: Number1 of day care providers for children under eight years of age by type of provider—Sunderland local authority area—position at 31 March 1997

Type of provider

1997

Day nurseries

20

Playgroups and pre-schools

20

Child minders

370

Out of school clubs

10

Holiday schemes

10

1 Figures are rounded to the nearest 10 if under 100, and to the nearest 100 if over 100.

Source:

Children’s Day Care Facilities Survey.

Local authorities were responsible for the registration and inspection of children’s day care facilities until these responsibilities were transferred to Ofsted in September 2001. The figures for 2005 were derived from the Ofsted database of registered child care providers. The figures for 1997 were derived from the Children’s Day Care Facilities Survey, which was discontinued in 2001. Therefore the figures for child care providers for 2005 are not directly comparable with the day care figures for 1997.

With the introduction of the National Day Care Standards and the transfer of responsibilities for registration and inspection of child care providers from local authority social service departments to Ofsted in September 2001, child care places were classified according to the type of day care provided: full day care, sessional day care, child minder, out of school day care or crèche day care. Ofsted have produced figures based on this classification on a quarterly basis from March 2003. Their latest figures were published in their report “Registered Childcare Providers and Places, September 2006”, which is available on their website:

www.ofsted.gov.uk/.

Up until March 2001, child care providers were classified according to the type of provider: day nurseries, playgroups and pre-schools, child minders, out of school clubs and holiday schemes. Figures based on this classification were published in a series of Statistical Bulletins, which are available from the Department’s website:

www.dfes.gov.uk/statistics.