You might lose your free hours for your 3/4 year old

[merryberry]

The Early Years Funding Single Formula for 'free' 3 and 4 year old childcare is supposed to be rolling out across England next month.
A statutory increase from 12.5 to 15 hours of free childcare is supposed to be on offer.

However, you may find like me that your nursery or pre-school or childminder says they cannot operate under the new code for one simple reason - they are not supposed to charge top up fees and that in fact your early years free childcare is now vanishing. They are supposed to offer completely free places only. Given that the funding is for under £4 an hour, you can see what is going to happen in other settings like my DS2's.

Either you pay full cost, you find/set up cheaper childcare provision yourself or you withdraw your child and get back into the home. I am spitting teeth over this.

Personally, I'd rather it was just bloody cut with a decent notice period to it so I could plan for it. Not warned in Mid-Feb by DS2's place that they 'think but not sure that we will have to withdraw from the scheme from April, but the LA doesn't know what's going on but the figures dictate that if the code is implemented as written, they will go bust within 17 weeks'.

As childcare providers around the country have found, each local authority is taking different approaches to various issues, like interpreting 'when is a top up charge not a top up charge' to try and keep places open and parents in work. It's a mess and it seems there is actually going to be a review of this over the next few weeks.

Please add yourself to this petition to add information and weight to the call for a rethink on this.

Please forgive me cross-posting, I'm popping this in the relevant pre-school topic areas.

Done.

They haven't been permitted to charge a "top-up" for the last 3 years in Surrey - they've just had to find other ways around it.............. Usually they have longer sessions and charge for the extra 15 minutes or so.

thank you!

Done

The increase was a year or so ago wasn't it? I'm confused.

I agree with CarGirl - I was under the impression that it wasn't permitted to top up the hours.

Not sure about the increase either, 15 hours is standard here, isn't it nationwide?

15 hours is standard everywhere now.
but the eysff although it says single is not a national scheme - each authority has its own formula.
it was due to come in last year, but there were so many problems that only about a third of authorities went ahead. the rest switch this april.

thanks nottimetoshop that makes more sense about what is happening.

BUMP- please please everyone sign the petition. The pre-school where I work will probably shut down if this goes through, purely because they want to offer good quality care with over and above the legal adult-child ratios.

In Hants top ups have been banned for years. SFF has increased sessional rates here immensely. This is for a community preschool and we are struggling but not broke yet.

Personally I think this thread is confusing two issues : 1) that your nursery will be withdrawing from funding and 2) we don't know what will happen in the future with the funding and it might disappear altogether should there be more budget cuts. Your thread title is misleading.

Goes boss eyed, but thinks in that case I should have called it 'you probably will...' instead :)

the variation across area is amazing. sorry to hear the boat you're in sugarskyhigh

yep the boat we are in is that we are going to probably opt out of the funding. This means that the parents will have to pay full fees. Which of course means lots of them will not be able to afford to use our pre=school any more - only the ones with more income. Which is not really fair.

I hope that makes it clear enough!! Can't believe there is not more of an uproar on here about this issue.

Still no - if you stop accepting the funding your parents will have a choice to either move their child to a place that does take the funding or they can choose to pay your fees.

I would suggest unless you have parents who are extraordinarily loyal and well off that your policy of not taking the free entitlement will lose you children. You don't say where in the country you are but this ruling has been in for years in Hants.

We've had our funding cut by nearly 10% at the preschool my DS goes to - I'm on the committee. Like 5ofus, we will be struggling but not broke ... yet. What I've found out since the latest figures have been published is that every setting is just so different that it is hard to get together to protest about it. We've never charged top-up's so that isn't a problem for us. We are more concerned about the unfairness of the whole formula. Why should private day nurseries get so much more than preschools? But it seems the government are happy to pay the profits of day nurseries rather than invest in quality community preschools.

Reading around this issue, I think what will happen is that NEF will only be available for certain children (probably those who now get their funding from age 2). It will mean the majority of people will have to pay and will mean a big group of children who just can't afford to access preschool education.

Do any of your funding formula's take into account quality? In Cambs, we don't have any quality component at all. If you do, how is that worked out? Is it just on OFSTED rating or do staff qualifications come into it?

Again I can only comment for Hants. We have seen a large increase in fees since the single funding formula came in last April. We were also one of the pilot pre-schools for the extended entitlement. Our funding is based on 4 criteria - flexibility, sustainability, quality and deprivation. Quality reflects the qualifications of the staff and is weighted to reflect time spent in session.

As a result we have changed our hours to offer stepped drop off times and pick up times. We therefore got the maximum rating for flexibility. We also employ very well qualified staff which gets us a good quality rating.

We don't receive any less funding for being a community preschool and not a nursery. It's just not included in the formula.

That said we are expecting to get our rate for 2011-12 in the next few weeks and given the latest cuts we do have a concern.

"if you stop accepting the funding your parents will have a choice to either move their child to a place that does take the funding or they can choose to pay your fees."

right - and in this area, (Herts), if they can't pay our fees they will HAVE to move their child to a place that does take the funding - which by definition will be a lower quality place

So parents who want good quality care but can't pay the full fees have no choice.

Thanks 5ofus. In Cambs, we only have 2 extra criteria above the base rate - flexibility and deprivation. Flexibility is a joke because you can only get the highest rate if you let children come and go at any time between 8-6 (i.e. a day nursery). Deprivation is just something we will get some years and not in other years as it is determined by the postcode of the children we have at the setting - which does seem fair even if I don't like that we don't get it.

It's dreadful that you don't have your 2011-12 rate yet. Doesn't it start in April? That doesn't give you any time at all to prepare.

I wonder if there is anywhere that is collecting the different rules for different areas. It seems ridiculous that things are so completely different everywhere. Obviously different areas are going to have different rates - inner London is bound to be more expensive than somewhere rural - but it is the different criteria everywhere that just seems unfair.

and if not enough parents are able to pay our fees - we will have to close :(

and around here, there aren't really any other places to move ds2 into. everything is either full, have utterly impractical hours for my work e.g 0930-1145, insist of taking up a full time place or are just well, dire.

Well, it was meant to roll out in April 2010 but was delayed for a year so Councils had extra time to be ready. As it's still a dog's breakfast, Does this mean it really is unworkable?

Camdancer: (standing ready to be corrected on this as not expert) I believe the higher non-state school rate is because non-state schools have to cover additional costs (business rates, buildings maintenance, insurances etc) that state schools are either exempt from or receive at a heavily discounted rate as they benefit from LEA provision. It levels the playing field a bit but, as many are finding out, is still all too often not covering costs.

merryberry what area are you in (roughly)?

SugarSkyHigh - I can't help but disagree with your assertion that by operating within the Early Years entitlement we are not offering good quality care. It's just not true. My son is extremely happy and well settled at his pre-school, I would not for one second consider him to be having anything other than a very good quality pre-school education.

It's a community pre-school, a registered charity and not-for-profit. I'm the treasurer and my son attends so I have a very good handle on both the quality of the provision and the finances of the pre-school.

The move to the single funding formula for us, and the move to 12.5 to 15 hours per week changed what we do as a pre-school in a fundamental way. When I started there 3 years ago we ran the standard 2.5 hour sessions, 2 a day and closed at 2.45pm. Since Jan 2009 when our 15 hours a week pilot started we have run flexible sessions between 8.30 and 3.30 and quite a number of our children stay all day at least once a week. Parents love it and have the flexibility to pay for additional hours on top of their entitlement.

I think it shows the standard 2.5 hour sessions are more and more a thing of the past and pre-schools who are still offering 2.5 hr sessions will have to adapt in order to compete.

the camden/islington border SugarSkyHigh.

5ofus I can only speak for Herts, where I am. If we are given £2.88 per hour per child, and our fees are over £8 per hour, we can't afford to employ decently qualified staff once the (high) rent has been paid. therefore, children will be forced to go to other settings with lower paid staff and lower staff-child ratios, where there are no extras such as special music/dance/French/yoga teachers etc. In other words, lower quality care.

metrina in Cambs, there are 3 types of setting (or 3 different base rates). Maintained nurseries (the state ones), private day nurseries and community preschools. Maintained nurseries and private day nurseries get significantly more than community preschools. The maintained nurseries have qualified teachers, usually have a head teacher and do have other reasons why they need more money. It is the difference between the private day nursery rate and the community preschool rate that I object to. Why should the government pay the profits of the private day nurseries?

5ofus I agree with you. We are also a community preschool but deliver a very high quality preschool education. We have highly qualified staff, which is expensive but try to keep all our costs as low as possible. Oh and we do loads of fundraising.

But we do get significantly more than £2.88 per hour per child. We'd definitely go under if that was our rate. There isn't such a massive difference between our NEF rate and our extra hours rate. £2.88 is a disgrace. How can anyone provide high quality education on that?