Customer Success Story:
Birmingham City Council
Background
Birmingham City Council is responsible for administering Early Years funding to a large and diverse network of education providers across the city. This includes managing universal and extended nursery entitlements, ensuring children meet eligibility criteria, and distributing funding accurately and on time. With hundreds of providers and thousands of children funded each term, the Council required robust systems and processes to support scale, compliance and transparency.
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The Challenge
Birmingham City Council’s Early Years Funding team needed a modern, reliable way to manage termly funding for children children aged 9 months to 4 years across more than 900 education providers.
Their existing process was largely paper-based, relying on manual headcounts and delayed data exchanges that could take up to four weeks. Providers were paid advance funding based on estimates, followed by later adjustments once actual numbers were confirmed. This created several issues:
Risk of over or under-payments
Limited visibility of duplicate claims across providers
Poor data quality and accuracy
High administrative overhead
Delays for providers waiting for funding confirmation
BCC needed a real-time, digital solution that could accurately capture child data, perform eligibility checks for Working Parents Funding , Free School Meals (FSM) and Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP), and support flexible term dates and holiday provision.
Solution
Sentinel Partners implemented our Early Years Funding Portal to fully digitise and automate the funding process.
The platform enables real-time eligibility checks via direct integration with the Department for Early Childhood Education System (ECE), allowing instant confirmation of funding status for providers and parents. Child data is captured online, removing paper forms and significantly improving data quality and accuracy.
The portal calculates payments based on actual attendance data, applies configurable funding rules and rates, and integrates directly with BCC’s finance systems to securely issue payments and statements to providers.
Results
Through the introduction of a real-time digital funding platform, Birmingham City Council strengthened the accuracy, efficiency and transparency of its Early Years funding operations.
Accurate, real-time funding calculations based on verified child data
Faster payments with reduced risk of overpayment or duplication
Significantly reduced administrative effort for the Early Years team
Improved transparency and visibility for providers and parents
Ongoing automated eligibility checks to ensure continued compliance
As a result, Sentinel Partners provided Birmingham City Council with a scalable, future-proof solution that supports consistent, compliant and confident delivery of Early Years funding across the city.
As a result, Sentinel Partners provided Birmingham City Council with a scalable, future-proof solution that supports consistent, compliant and confident delivery of Early Years funding across the city.
“The solution has significantly enhanced our early years services, supporting over 480 providers and 13,000 children this term alone.”
Birmingham City Council Early Years Team
