Applying for free childcare hours

[DoreenGrey]

Hi everyone, I just posted this on the childcare support Q&A, but copying here to as it’s quite specific!

I’m adopting a child, likely to get adoption order first week in August, and then wait for adoption certificate. I’m obviously eager not to lose out on the funded hours, but she starts nursery a month after that court date. Obviously child’s surname will change when adoption is finalised.
I’m thinking I should apply now anyway, under original surname, but I’m just anxious that not long after this her name will change, and this will cause hassle and time to change. Do you think this will likely cause a delay and hence pause in funded hours? I’m trying to work out whether to just apply now, or hold on until name changes. I want to minimise or ideally avoid missing out on funded time due to something beyond my control.

I have no prior experience of applying for govt funded childcare hours (which seems complicated enough), let alone in this situation!

WWYD?

not sure it’s the answer but our our little one is under old name on childcare account.

we need to wait until the next certification period they have said to change his name.

also you won’t get certificates etc for weeks if not months after the order is made.

agree with PP. We applied for funded hours with the original name as there was a few weeks between adoption order being granted in court and the letter arriving to allow us to apply for the certificate (which also took a week to come).
If we’d waited he would have missed pretty much an entire term as the request also takes time to be processed.

Thanks for your replies, has helped me decide to put the application for funding in asap.
It’s going to be embarrassing because currently her first name is spelt wrong (not a variation, literally one of the letters has been left out)! 😑

If u claim child benefit make them one of the priority to send adoption cert to when you have it, firstly because sometime they stop the child benefit after a year of claiming if they haven’t had the adoption cert.

secondly when I was sorting the name change for the funding, you have to wait till it’s time to reconfirm which is normally every three months, you can’t change the name become reconfirmation time , they told me they compare it against the child benefit names. I also sent the adoption cert to them before the reconfirmation time so they had proof early. You get a month to reconfirm the info for childcare funding. I suggest doing it as soon as they ask, that way if there are any issues have a month before the deadline to get
it sorted x