To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families pursuant to the answer of 28 January 2009, Official Report, column 657W, on pre-school education: teaching, which programmes are funded by the Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare Grant; how much has been spent on the Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare Grant in each year for which records are available; and how much is forecast to be spent in each financial year up to the end of the 2010-11 financial year. (260153)

The Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare Grant funding is not provided for specific programmes for the training of childcare staff but is provided in ring-fenced blocks to allow local authorities to respond to their local priorities.

Funding to improve the quality of practice and the capability of the workforce in early years settings is provided to Local Authorities within the outcomes, quality and inclusion strand of the Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare Grant.

The funding allocated for outcomes quality and inclusion for the CSR period April 2008 to March 2011 is shown in the following table.

While the outcomes, quality and inclusion categorisation of funding was introduced in April 2008 the Department has records of local authority spend under the broadly analogous category of workforce development from April 2004, as shown in the following table¹.

¹ Not all audits have been received from the local authorities for 2007/08 and 2006/07. For those programmes with outstanding audits spend figures have been taken from unaudited returns. Where these are unavailable an average spend rate has been applied to their allocation to produce a likely spend. In 2005/06 seven local authorities were in local area agreements, 26 in 2006/07 and 24 in 2007/08. No spend for these authorities is available as they were not required to submit statements of spend to the Department.