Deadline: 4-Jun-25
The Armed Forces Families Fund is offering grants towards projects that enable early childhood education and childcare settings to meet specific needs of young service children.
The Early Years programme is designed to help Armed Forces families access good quality early childhood education and childcare provision close to where they live or serve.
Funding Information
- Amount: award grants between £5,000 and £80,000
Outcomes
- It will address barriers that service families may experience in accessing good quality childcare for their preschool aged children and will support projects lasting up to two years that can meet one of the four outcomes.
- Expanded capacity in early years settings, allowing more service children to attend.
- Enhanced learning environments that better support the educational development of service children.
- Improved staff skills and knowledge through targeted training and professional development.
- Establishing collaborative networks and shared resources through clusters to effectively address the needs of service children.
Who can apply?
- Applications are now open for early childhood education and childcare providers serving armed forces families near where they live or work.
- To be eligible, your setting will need to offer group based childcare where children from armed forces families comprise at least 50% of the children on roll.
- Have a smaller number of service children than this? They are also offering the chance for settings with less than 50% service children on roll to form ‘clusters’ of three or more settings. As a cluster, you can apply for funding for:
- staff training with an armed forces focus
- funding for a shared resource, such as a roving armed forces Early Years Support Worker.
- Local authorities can also apply.
For more information, visit Armed Forces Families Fund.