AIBU - No benefit from 15 free hours

[ilovepenguins79]

I have just had my invoice from my daughter's nursery for her first month of funded hours. We get 15 hours - 11 as its stretched. Its a private day nursery.

However the invoice is for exactly the same amount of money as the month before due to the extra charges made every month. So the nursery gets the £500 apx that we always paid plus the funding from the government.

AIBU? Surely this is not right that the nursery seems to be making money from the funding as well as charging us? Isn't the point of funding to make it more accessible?

And tapestry costs £2 per child, per year

Wow! I'm still a year away from this but already can't wait to hear what the council says, I thought it was supposed to help parents not cost exactly the same!

Sorry meant to add - what's tapestry?

Cancel your funding if you need to stay with them. I'd be tempted to speak to some other parents too.

They are profiting from the funding instead of it benefiting the working parents.

Local Facebook news pages love this kind of story.

www.tapestry.info/

Tapastry is an online programme used by nursery,s to log paper work, track child progress and communicate with parents. (there are other similar companies.)

@KatyButton be very careful. If they claim for 30 hours and he goes for 9, they (The council) will come to you and claim any unattended hours back.

I'd call the council, when I was treasurer of the pre-school we were told that that top up fees were voluntary and we had to provide funded hour only. Your nursery are taking the Mickey.

We charge for tapestry OP but some of your charges are ridiculous frankly!

And tapestry costs £2 per child, per year

Erm not really?! Mine is £20 per child per year. I don’t pass this on to parents but felt I needed to point this out that it won’t be the same for every setting.

Wow.
Our private nursery told us there was a cap on the additional charges they could apply once we qualified for the 15 hours.
We paid £10 a day for food. This was lunch only and I thought it was the maximum they were allowed (although this was 2017).
Agree with the posters saying vote with your feet.

We went through the same rubbish years ago. We complained and submitted a calculation which we felt was fair. E.g. we rejected them saying that the 5 days a week discount shouldn't apply because this discount is based on them being able to employ a regular number of staff and not having too much of a dip in their child to adult ratio. as you say, the funding doesn't alter this. Nursery either agreed with us or met us half way (can't remember which).

I am following this out of sheer nosiness now as I literally cannot believe what I am reading!

Wow. Sounds like the nursery are taking the utter piss. There must be somewhere you can report this to?

i thought that the purpose of the additional 15v hours was to support working parents!

It is. What they are doing is unlawful. Many nurseries do manage to staff themselves with the government funding.

I would certainly complain to the council. I would also look for another nursery.

Wow this is something else. Report them and start enquiring into other nurseries.

100% taking the piss! Paying for access to the grounds! Cheeky fuckers!

Wow that's shocking I would change nursery's. I get 22.5 hours a week free 50 weeks of year (Scotland) so we get two full days plus 2.5 hours on a Friday morning and my nursery bill is zero. They provide breakfast lunch and snacks too included.

We had to his exact same thing. He never went back and we reported to the council as they were getting funding from them for the hours.

Oh, sorry, my info was out of date. It used to be like that but thinking about it, it was quite a long time ago.

Definitely report all of this to your local council. They are not allowed to do this. I'm a childminder and I will have a new funded child start next year doing 30 hours. Parents only want 6 hrs a day. Now I cant afford to offer just this as I would sacrifice £50 per week but I'm happy to be reasonable and charge £3 per day extra to the parent instead so they dont feel ripped off and during school hols I will get full payment. I also like short hours sometimes so it suits me too.

This gets worse with every update. At least they've given you 6 weeks. Fingers crossed your notice period is only 1 month

We had almost the same in our nursery.
The reason being that there were different rates for the "full day" (including lunch) and then "half day session" + "lunchtime session" + "half day session", with "half day" being ~75% of the daily cost, and "lunchtime session" (which included both lunch and childcare for roughly two hours) being around 20%.
So you could opt to have one "half day" for four days out of five sponsored by the 15 hour allowance, but then you'd still pay 95% of the old daily rate for four days and 100% for the fifth.
To be fair, it was not introduced with the intention to enrich themselves on government funds, this policy existed before any free childcare, as the setting was not interested in half-day bookings from the perspective of staff planning.

Yes notice period is a month.

They also have 'training days' which we have to pay for (but don't get the childcare) which they charge for (and take funding for) but we have no childcare. I think i will be looking at other nurseries. I will report to the council too.

Its sad really as DD loves it there and they do seem to have more 'extras' that the other local nurseries. Its a bit out of the way from DS school so that could be the reason why.

I am an owner and manager of an over subscribed day nursery. What is happening here is awful, and frankly Im ashamed to be a part of the same profession as these cowboys.
Yes, the rate of funding received from the local authority is less than the market value of the hourly rate of the nursery, which is why there are ingenious ways of applying “top up fees”, in order to make up the difference. However, the point of these funding hours is to help parents, not line the pockets of greedy nursery owners, so the items for which the top up fees are applied must be clearly detailed on the invoice, and importantly, the parent must be able to “opt out”, thereby making the fifteen hours free at point of use. For example, if meals are charged for, then the parent must have the option to bring in their own food and not be charged.