School-based nursery capital grant 2024 to 2025: registrations of interest summary
Published 2 April 2025
Applies to England
© Crown copyright 2025
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The Department for Education set up a register of interest for the school-based nursery capital grant.
We did this to get information about interested schools who were either not ready to apply, or ineligible to apply, for this funding round.
We took basic school details through information fields, and information on why schools:
- were interested in adding or expanding SBN provision
- did not apply this time
Number of schools that registered an interest
Five hundred and ninety-two schools submitted a registration of interest to provide school-based nursery places in the future.
This excludes 10 duplicate records, and 10 schools who also applied for the grant for 2024 to 2025.
What the registations involved
Of the registrations:
- 55% indicated they want to expand existing nursery provision
- 42% indicated an interest in opening a new nursery
This compares to 76% of phase 1 applications bidding to expand, and 24% bidding to establish a new nursery.
Ninety-eight per cent of schools who submitted a registration of interest wanted to deliver their own provision. Two per cent expressed an interest in working with a private, voluntary or independent provider. This compares to 9% of phase 1 applications proposing to work with a private, voluntary or independent provider.
Reasons why schools did not apply
The most common barriers to applying for the grant were:
- not having enough time to prepare a bid (28%)
- needing to extend or build new early years provision (18%)