School-based nursery capital grant 2025 to 2026: registrations of interest summary
Updated 23 March 2026
Applies to England
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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, including URN, and asked why schools:
- were interested in adding or expanding SBN provision
- did not apply this time
Number of schools that registered an interest
Two hundred and thirty-four schools submitted a registration of interest to provide school-based nursery places in the future.
This excludes 21 duplicate records, and 5 schools who also applied for the grant for 2025 to 2026.
Creating new or expanding existing provision
Of the registrations:
- 52% are from schools with existing nursery provision
- 48% are from schools without existing nursery provision
This compares to 69% of phase 2 applications bidding to expand, and 31% bidding to establish a new nursery.
Reasons why schools did not apply
Analysts performed a thematic analysis to identify key and recurring themes for why respondents were interested but did not apply for the phase 2 grant.
The most common barriers to applying for the grant were:
- tight timelines on preparing a bid/delivering provision (51%)
- having a greater interest in applying for phase 3 (24%)