To think some nurseries are pleading poverty unfairly?

they have to cover cooking staff, perhaps rent of the building. If they own a building, then maintenance costs, gas & electric, insurance costs, childcare staff need paid.Its a business at the end of the day and a lot of hidden costs you don’t think about, this is a naive post OP

I work for a central government department @LanahLane not a Local Authority.

But I deal with lots of them - not just one. So I've had the opportunity to see how crap some of them are with managing money. It's not to say that some are struggling with funding their statutory duties, but lots don't manage money very well. It's not an easy thing to do but that's why a top notch CFO gets paid highly - and they're worth every penny!

Which LA do you work for?

Mine is struggling to save £5m again this year, in Children's Services alone, due to Tory budget cuts.

FIVE MILLION in funding services for including for vulnerable children. (SEND, children’s social care including social work support, fostering and adoption, early years, safeguarding, school transport, school place management)

Certainly nothing left to waste.

No surprise at all. The local spent a quarter of a million pounds on our local village library (heaven knows how as all they did was decorate and put in new shelves, new computers, etc., and mood lighting!). And less than a year later they closed it, and with undue haste ripped it all out and it all ended up in several large skips! Then a year later, after a local election, they re-opened it again, and had to spend another quarter of a million on kitting it out again, more new shelving, more new computers, and more new mood lighting. Utterly bonkers. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and they just don't care. They have a "budget" to spend and they make sure they spend it, on anything!

I read this

”The LawChildcare settings aren’t allowed to charge you extra for the hours your child is attending as a funded child, but they are allowed to dictate how they offer their funded places, which can leave parents confused. For example; if a child attended a setting for 30 hours a week, the setting wouldn’t be allowed to ask for an extra £1 for every hour attended. However, they would be allowed to charge for trips, food, etc as the EYF isn’t intended to cover this, and they can dictate where the hours are used to suit the business.”

That’s the top up fee

I agree with you.

Provision for children with special needs.

Government academy programmes means that LA/councils can not open new schools.
They have to be awarded permission to build by the DfE, then DfE try to find an academy trust to open a school.
Years in the planning and agreements. We have the permission to build and no trusts willing to open the school.
Meanwhile children’s needs are not met and mainstream schools are buckling under the pressure.
Savvy parents will take the LA to tribunal, so that their child’s needs are recognised and met. The tribunal meets the parents rushes in 96% of cases.

No LA school places, so school named as private specialist provision and out of the county.
At the minute it isn't unusual for those private school places to cost £120,000 per child, per year. These are not children with highly complex needs in resudential care. These are children coming out of mainstream schools
In addition, the LA has to find money for taxi costs to and from the out of county school.

Complete breakdown in the system. Abandon the politics and let the LA use the £120,000 per child per year to fund local specialist, council run, provision. Meet the needs of our children, locally and publically.

We are in the south east, and I know we are definitely not the only setting that sets our consumables charge somewhere around that rate.

So you have detailed insider knowledge in how it all works or are being a busybody?

You can spend hours researching and checking companies house but why? You need to get your head around the fact that child care is really fucking expensive. Thats it. It is. Those years are a struggle financially, but it does end, but there’s no getting around it if you work and need childcare. Do they make a lot of money? No. Is it a really lucrative industry no? Is it hard work? Definitely!

I have an acquaintance and she owned many nurseries, maybe 4-7 over the years. The business itself was not a huge money spinner but the properties were. She owned them, so when she sold up, that’s where she earned the money, not charging £80 to look after a child from 8am-6pm.

I’m actually really sick of parents moaning about this!

You are getting an absolute bargain for childcare in most cases! £9 for a whole day of childcare in our setting.

.
Do you want good quality care?
Do you want staffing levels that appropriate, safe and manageable according to the needs of the children?
Do you want a well thought out, wide and varied curriculum?
Do you want staff to be paid fairly?
Do you want high quality resources replaced when necessary?
Do you want staff to be qualified and experienced?
Do you want staff to work in an environment that supports their well-being (reflected in how they care for your children and wether they turn up for work?)
Do you want staff to have access to CPD to continue to broaden their knowledge and develop the educational opportunities for your children?
Do you want settings to be able to employ a one to one for the child that needs it, allowing your child to continue about their day without disruption?
Do you want the building heated?
Good quality food, nappies, wipes, formula?
(and much more…)

or would you prefer none of the above?

You pay full price fees during school holidays though because, as you say, funded hours are term time only so why would I need to pay a top up to also cover school holidays when I'm paying full fees during said holidays? (Appreciate a lot of nurseries offer to spread the 30 hours throughout the year but it's the same thing, you either spread it through the year so receive less funded hours each week or you receive 30/15 whatever during term time and pay full fees during the holidays).

The top-up fee includes things the government doesn't provide for like running through holidays. The free hours apply to term time only (there are roughly 13 weeks of school hols scattered throughout the year). Also nurseries/preschools can make charge for: crafts materials, food and nappies/wipes/cream. I'm always surprised that people are surprised that the government doesn't cover their childcare costs. Ours was the size of a London mortgage...

I'm not telling myself anything @Berlioze. Everything I said in my post is factually correct. Yes NHS have taken on some terrible PFI deals which their CFO should have vetoed because the affordability was based on budgets increasing every year which is never a given in the public sector. And some of these happened under the coalition Government. But other than schools there's been very few PFI deals that reached financial close after 2012.

That's because HMT published an analysis of how crap the vfm was for PFIs in 2011. It's not as simple as stories bad and Labour good. The main explosion of PFI happened under Labour. Now you can argue that investment was required and this was a good way of delivering it - but the facts speak for themselves. Look at the HMT PPP data publication and it shows when the deals reached financial close.

You keep telling that to yourself forgetting 60+ PFI schemes progressed by Osborne which riddled the NHS with enormous debt.

Some Director level posts in local authorities also have salaries that are higher than the prime ministers, it’s shocking. And some of these posts are dubious like director of communication on £170K - for a local authority???

That's not borne out by the evidence. PFI actually started under John Major but was massively expanded under the Labour Government who saw it as a good way of building public buildings without adding to the debt on the balance sheet.

It's been the Conservatives that changed PFI to PF2 (removing most of the ability of the private sector to print money) and then removed the ability to do PFI at all.

Under the Labour Gov public sector bodies had to use PFI as their options to borrow to do a standard capital build were significantly restricted. PFI is one of the things I'm responsible for in my sector so I'm pretty clear on the history of it.

I agree. I also work in finance for a central gov department and some local authorities are also completely crap at managing money. Sometimes it's that they don't have a good CFO but often it's because the local councillors are batshit. The CFO should be managing that appropriately but it's difficult in local government if you're the one having to say No all the time.

I do think the majority of the public would be shocked at just how badly local government is run. I wasn't aware until I got the job I'm in now and even after several years I still sometimes get the WTF moments when you realise what some of them have been doing/buying.

You have the option of not using the free hours and pay directly, no?and then it’s straightforward

Big figures but it's a big chain.

It's only £252 per year per child
Or
£1,043 per staff member
Or
£26,000 per branch

Break the numbers down and it's really not that much at all.

Basically, if they charged a fiver per week less per child, they'd be loss making!

Just shows how tight the margins are even at a huge chain! Same applies to supermarkets like Tesco. Big "headline" figures for profit, but break it down per branch, per customer, per employee, and it's pretty small and basically on a knife edge between a profit and a loss.

Just remember everyone quoting government rates, this varies by local authority. It is not a blanket amount.
Also the rate given to each local authority by the government is not the rate received by the setting.
The government say that the provider should receive at least 95% of the rate. However once our local authority have done their very complicated calculations, they take off about 8% in our area, some areas will be less-some more.

I always paid top-ups and was happy to because our nursery was amazing and the staff paid more than minimum wage. The ratio was higher than the minimum and the food was good.

For 3 year olds the government rate is £5.62 an hour for 38 weeks of the year. That is really very little.

Assuming very basic ratio of 1:8 on minimum wage you’d take out £1.60 (and eighth salary inc employer NI and pension) and say another £1 contribution towards a manager’s salary. Bigger chains will then have other staffing overheads like regional managers, payroll etc. So out of that hourly rate at least half would be gone straight away on staff. You’ve then got electric, heating and water. Then you’d have to pay for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. I can’t see how it would add up at all if you had to pay rent on top.

Where do I find that part?

Then don’t use the huge companies? Trust me the quality of care in these large chain nurseries is “variable” at best 🤷‍♀️