AIBU to think £62.50 is expensive for a 7.30am-6pm nursery day?

[DanielsandLukesmum]

I'm absolutely shocked.

That includes food, nappies and wipes.

Exactly what we currently pay and we're in Greater London- Bromley borough.

It really varies in my city a preschool room varies from £34 to £74, dependant on the setting.

I must admit the service is reflective of the price.

Whilst I had no particular issues with the nursery I was paying £34 a day for, the building was tired, the staff where all really young (fresh out of college) and badly paid (which I think contributed to lots of sickness and absence, poor attrition)

However there was 1-2 really passionate members of staff that stuck, and kind of made up for the others.

The fancy preschool (we moved) is amazing, the starting salary for staff is about 2/3k above average and the resources available within the preschool are brilliant. Including resources to make the practitioners jobs easier.

If I had to select a nursery in the future I will definitely be going more on staff (salary, qualifications, attrition etc) and then resources second, and price last.

I would happily pay more for happy well motivated staff in a nursery any day, they are what makes the place successful on reality!

Well 8-3.30 so less hours but yes. Wipes, nappies food etc have to be provided though.

We are heavily subsidised but I'm still shocked at UK nursery prices.

(This is coming from a nanny that got £12 net per hour at the end of my game and I can only imagine it's gone up so shouldn't be too shocked I suppose.)

No wonder all of my mates back home moan so much about childcare costs, I had no idea!

I run a nursery, and part of the problem is ofsted constantly pushing up standards which is great but it comes at a cost, and unfortunately this has priced some people of the market.
At some point soon nurseries will only be accessible to the rich.

My staff are paid just above nmw

Northwest outstanding nursery 35 pounds a day all food in. And the job me and DH have means unless London we would be paid the same wherever. We both have good professional jobs but we couldn't afford what you are paying a day OP

So it's £58 for 10 hours and £4.50 for breakfast club. Inclusive of everything.
Exactly what I paid at my previous nursery.
I pay 54 now including food and no breakfast club as I'm seeing if I can forego that extra cost.
My son has the 30 hours funding so we pay 6.50 a day in top up fees.

It's £7.70 to be exact after googling exchange rate.

Definitely SE prices. We paid 72.50 IIRC 5 years ago for baby room. Nappies and wipes included but not formula. Then about £67 for over 2. Can't remember how it worked out when the 3-4 year old funding kicked in.

Not London but big SE town.

18 months. Then it's cheaper than I've been paying for my under-2s for the past 3 or 4 years. And I'm not far from you. And my nursery is good rather than outstanding and it's 8-6 rather than 7.20-6.

Two kids at nursery and you're better off with a nanny. Or not working. Bloody hell. If it goes up much more I don't see it being sustainable.

£48 a day 0800-1800 included all food and wipes but not nappies, Bucks- outstanding nursery. I can't imagine paying some of the fees on here- £90?! We need a Swedish model fast!

We pay £70 a day, open from 7:30-6:30. DS usually there from 7:30-6.
"All inclusive" so nappies, food, formula etc. Seems pretty standard for our area, zone 3 London.

I work in a private day nursery rated outstanding, £62 a day for baby room 7.30am-6pm. Everything (nappies, meals, wipes, formula milk, etc) is included in that. I'm in east Anglia

£75 where we live, outside London!
It was 7.30-6.30 and included all nappies/food etc. Still, super expensive!. But cheaper than when we lived in Chiswick and it was about £83/day!
DS starts school next week! I'm relieved...!

That includes food nappies and wipes??
And it's 10.5 hrs?
Nope that's pretty standard I'm afraid.

Have a waiting list up to mid-2019 so very sought after. No idea myself how people afford it, it's almost as much as I get paid for working all day there

In our part of edinburgh around £90 per day is the norm.

That's what we pay in Herts. But doesn't include nappies or wipes. Does include amazing organic food that it's 10x better than what I cook. £6 an hour for that plus dedicated lovely staff that take care of the thing that's most precious in my life for me? A bargain I'd say.

Cm here midlands

. I charged £45 a day but I was cheap and outstanding!

Included food and wipes but not nappies.

It's a good price op for a nursery.

I pay a rate of £54 a day in Norfolk. Includes lunch and dinner. Breakfast is an extra £1.50, nappies provided from home

It was a choice I made. I don't like it when people say I have no choice but to work or I have no choice but to stay at home as that is not strictly true. It is just that the one option won out in the decision making process.

But it's not a choice if childcare costs more than your salary and part of your partner's salary, you earn too much to be entitled to benefit but by working you wouldn't be able to cover basic living costs like the mortgage, food and heating. That's not a choice that's a decision made. With 3 dc in childcare I've been there and that decision was forced upon me. With dh being the higher earner he still didn't earn enough to cover bills and part of the childcare costs. My whole salary covered 2 dc but the 3rd would have come from his (disclaimer: all our money is family money but we had to look at where is came from). My salary wasn't enough to cover bills alone, dh's just about did, so the decision was made that I'd have to give up work (temporarily). We are not alone in this. Could we afford 3dc? No but 2nd of was twins so slightly out of our hands.

Some nurseries ARE raking it in, but it's not usually going to the childcarers. It's going to the owner of the business, who is an "entrepreneur" without the slightest knowledge of childcare getting richer for each nursery in their chain.

Most easily spotted in 'naice' areas with career conscious, high earning parents. Actually, I'd say most in those particular areas are that.

Yes there's overheads, but even at a ratio of 3:1 you're getting 2-3 x average annual wages per worker, times again by how many children are actually being cared for. The cost of one child can, and is, used by people across the country to pay for rent, and food, and nappies. At 30x that, and remember the increases aren't linear, they can afford rent in expensive locations and the other expenses that come with - with a fat slice off the top. Add another location. And another. And a dozen more. And Mr NeverSeenABaby is going on his third holiday.

The subsidies for childcare are to keep the high earning, almost-not-managing-the-bill parents lining the fatcats pockets, or keeping low earners out of the employment stats, while the genuine nurseries struggling to compete have to cope with a pay cut.

We pay 39 for our baby and 38 for toddler, includes food and wipes, not nappies and is from 7.30 til 6pm, we dont leave them there that long though. Its ofsted outstanding. In my limited experience ive found areas where there is more demand prices seem to be sky high. I know of one ten minutes away right by the train station that is 59 pounds a day 😲

bbpp whilst I don't deny they exist I think the big chain types like that are the exception rather than the rule. They also generally have economies of scale - a head office who can deal with admin and queries, multiple premises close together so they can move staff between them easily to cover absence (meaning they don't need as many spare staff) and so on.

There are a lot of struggling childcare providers out there though, and the inadequate government funding doesn't help.