Iterating the Early Years (EY) Claim service guidance pages

Introduction to the Early Years Financial Incentive Service

The EY Financial Incentive service is a new initiative designed to address critical staffing challenges in nurseries across England. Its aim is to help nurseries struggling to recruit and retain EY educators by providing £1,000 incentive payments (also known as ‘recruitment bonuses’). These payments can be advertised alongside job roles to attract new practitioners or encourage experienced professionals to return to the sector.

Pilot activity has been underway during 2024 and 2025 to test the policy and delivery mechanism.

Why was this service needed?

This initiative comes at a pivotal time. In March 2023, the then-Chancellor announced significant reforms to childcare, including an expansion of free childcare hours for working parents. The government elected in July 2024 has agreed to continue delivery of these reforms.

By September 2025, all children aged 9 months to 4 years with qualifying working parents will be eligible for 30 hours of free childcare.

While this reform is a step forward, delivering it successfully depends on the availability of skilled EY educators. However, recruitment challenges persist—over two-thirds of group-based providers and more than half of school-based providers reported difficulties finding staff in 2022. The EY Financial Incentive pilot activity seeks to directly address this issue by helping nurseries secure the workforce they need to meet rising demand.

Eligibility criteria for the initiative

Only nurseries that are contacted by DfE are eligible to take part in the initiative. In private beta, these nurseries were in the following local authorities:

• Barking and Dagenham
• Coventry
• Gateshead
• Redcar and Cleveland
• Telford and Wrekin
• Thurrock

These local authorities were chosen because they have:

• high levels of deprivation
• low numbers of available nursery places compared to the number of children who need a place

EY educators who are new or returning to an early years setting are eligible for a recruitment bonus if:

• the role they’ve applied for is a permanent part-time or full-time contract - they do not need to work a minimum number of contracted hours to be eligible
• they’ll spend most of the time (70% or more) in their role working directly with children
• they have not worked in a permanent nursery role in the 6 months prior to starting their new role, where they spent most of their time (70% or more) working directly with children

EY educators are not eligible for a £1,000 recruitment bonus if they are:

• an apprentice, even if they’re on a permanent contract during their apprenticeship - once they complete their apprenticeship and move into a permanent non-apprenticeship role, they will become eligible
• an employee who has returned from a long period of leave, such as maternity leave
• on a non-permanent contract - such as a temporary, voluntary or agency contract

How the service works

Once an EY educator starts their new role:

1. Their employer starts a claim on their behalf, answering questions about the EY educator's eligibility for a recruitment bonus.
2. The money is reserved for the EY educator, who receives an email with a link to complete the claim - during this part of the service, the EY educator needs to verify their identity via One Login and submit their personal details (such as their address and bank details).
3. After 6 months, the provider is asked via email to confirm that the EY educator is still in their role.
4. If the EY educator is still in their role, DfE pays the recruitment bonus directly into their bank account.

Where we started in private beta

At the start of private beta, the service had a comprehensive detailed guidance page that was targeted at the EY settings (providers) who had taken on new and returning EY educators:

Clicking on the ‘start now’ button in the CTA box at the top took the provider to the following landing page. This landing page repeated some information from the detailed guidance page, and told the provider that they needed to obtain consent from the EY educator to share their information during the eligibility criteria questions (which starts immediately after the provider clicks ‘start now’ at the bottom of the page below):

The service also had an EY educator guidance page. This was only accessible to the EY educator once they received an email confirming that the provider had started a claim on their behalf. The EY educator guidance page also repeated a lot of the information from the detailed guidance page:

What we decided to do next

After reviewing the guidance pages with the Digital Communications team, we decided that the service could work better if we consolidated all the guidance into one detailed guidance page targeted at both user groups.

We could then link to two shorter landing pages (one for providers and one for EY educators), only including information that is relevant to each user group before they complete their respective parts of the overall journey. None of the content from the detailed guidance page would be duplicated on either of these pages, as participants during UR generally understood the initial detailed guidance page and recognised the repetition - for example:

The first step to achieve this structure was to audit all of the content across the 3 pages - identifying what content was relevant to both user groups, or just providers or EY educators. We then created the new guidance and landing pages in Figma by:

• marking up existing content against each audience category
• identifying areas of repetition, and consolidating content where it made sense (using UR findings from the end of the beta phase to help inform where content should be situated)

Our first iterations are below:

Testing the new structure with users

When we tested the new structure with providers during UR, they found the new pages easy to navigate and structured (as expected) like a standard government website.

They also noted that the content was informative, but not overwhelming. The level of detail was described as just enough for a first time visitor, with links provided for them to find further information if they require.