Hi, posting in chat for traffic! We're first time parents and frankly finding the whole childcare funding entitlement really hard to wrap our heads around. Contacted the council several times asking for them to help/ explain but got a generic response both times to just look at the government website (!) 🤦🏻♀️
We have a 3 year old who attends a nursery 3 days a week, we were told via the government website that we've been eligible for the 10.5 free hours of childcare since January as he turned 3 in October. On the website we were led to believe that we had to choose whether to claim the free hours or to continue with our tax free childcare account. We worked out that for us we save more continuing with the tax free childcare as we want to keep our son in his nursery where he's very settled and if we decided to send him to the local preschool we'd have to also fund a childminder to handle the hours outside of those offered by preschool due to our work. There isn't a wrap around service so we couldn't use that.
So for 2 months we've just continued with the tax free childcare account, then I was reading a thread on here a couple of days ago from someone in England and one poster replied that they were entitled to both free hours and tax free childcare as they had a 3 year old!? Can anyone living in Wales who currently has a child of preschool age please set me straight on exactly what we can or can't claim please? I'd be very grateful! Thank you 😊