High quality early years provision is crucial to child development. It is key for developing language, social, emotional and physical skills and good behaviour. There is a crisis in preschool early years and childcare provision. There is a lack of places, financial instability, recruitment and retention difficulties and a pressing need for upskilling the workforce. One in three children are not ready for school. There is an alarming rise in childhood development delays, notably in speech and language development. Children from the most deprived areas are particularly at risk from the crisis in provision. They are 18.5 percentage points behind children from the least deprived areas on the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) profile.