Need to do 30 hours at nursery to get 30 hours free?

[Maternityleavelady]

DD turned 3 in March and according to government criteria we are eligible for 30 free hours from 1st April. She attends nursery 3 days per week, 8 hours per day, so 24 hours per week, but it’s all year round.
Nursery says we can’t access the 30 free hours unless we increase her hours to 30 per week. Obviously happy to have this slight cost increase in order to be able to access the big discount provided by 30 hours, but I would have thought attending 24 hours per week all year round would be roughly equivalent to attending 30 hours in term time only - so not sure why we need to up our weekly hours in order to get the 30 hours?

Just to make you aware, you have to sign up for the 30 free hours online and you are given a code which you might have to give to the nursery before the 1st of April (or even earlier !)
If you miss the deadline I think you have to wait until the next term to start receiving the free hours (September)

My nursery are applying the free hours from April and mine only goes 2 days a week - I’m not sure how much I will save yet as it does seem complicated !

I'm a former Childminder. The 30 funded hours are term time only. 38 weeks x 30 hours = 1140 hours entitlement. 24 hours x 52 weeks = 1248. A shortfall of 108 hours, so near enough the same but a slight cost to you. If it was stretched across 52 weeks then it would be 22 hours per week. Ask them if they do stretched funding? Sounds like the answer is no.

Settings may choose how to operate funded hours. It has to work for their setting. Some will stretch the hours across the year, others will use them term time only. Some will have a limited number of places or only offer a certain number of hours per day. Settings don't even need to offer funding, although most do.

It sounds like you are saying you want to keep her at 24 hours a week and they're saying she can't have any funding if that's the case. Speak to the funding team at your LA as they'll be able to advise you. I'm pretty sure you don't have to use the full 30 to access it.

They can't do that. You need to report them. If they are claiming the 30 hours payment then they have to provide you with 30 hours care, to not do so is fraud. They can charge top up for lunchtimes etc, but they cannot restrict the hours they provide and still claim the 30 hr payment.

Yes it all got submitted before the deadline, and we were aware there would still be some costs to pay, but were a bit taken aback at having to increase our hours in order to actually benefit

Yes we would prefer to keep her at 24 hours if it was possible (our younger DC is also on 24 hours so it doesn’t make much sense to have them on different hours)

I wouldn’t expect them to ‘carry’ those 6 hours you’re not using over to holiday time. But I wouldn’t have thought you actually had to send her there for an extra 6 hours to get the 30 free, that seems unusual.

My 3 year old’s nursery offers two blocks of three hours a day, so you can go 9-12, and/or 1-4, and you can do as many or as few of those slots as you want, to make up the 30 hours. You then pay for lunch (if they’re staying the whole day), or for any earlier/later hours. It does mean that if say they do two days a week from 8-6, which is 20 hours- they could only claim 12 hours of this, and would pay the extra bits.

Thanks for all your replies. I appreciate the government funding doesn’t cover nursery’s full costs and we also knew that the government funding is term time, but as you are all saying it seems it varies a lot from one nursery to the next how they apply the free hours. One of my friends had her bill go down from £700 to £50 per month. Ours has gone down from £975 (for 24 hours per week) to £600 per month (for 30 hours per week) so it’s a saving but not nearly as much as we hoped. We had been warned by friends that it wasn’t going to be as good as we were expecting so it wasn’t a massive shock but I didn’t realise it was so complicated!

@Maternityleavelady I would urge you to contact the funding team at your LA to check that it's "allowed".

Thinking about it you can share funding across different settings so it really shouldn't be a problem to just use 24 hours.

Nursery says we can’t access the 30 free hours unless we increase her hours to 30 per week.

What a strange way to put it as the nursery can have different rules for different age groups.

So the nursery my DD goes to allows 2 year olds to go for 2 days per week but when the hit the 3 year old funding age, they have to go for 3 days per week.

The cost to the parents depends on different factors e.g. the LA you live in, government funding.

IF she only attends the nursery 24 hours a week then they would only be able to claim 24 hours funding!

I used to submit the claims in my old job and if say a child attended 2 10 hour days (20 hours) I could only claim 20 hours for that term

may have changed but that used to be the case

We used to charge a top up for all the meals & extra activities like the french / drama / music / football classes we had where external teachers came in!

Technically you need to offer the basic package if someone only wants the funded hours - however- it would have meant that child was quite excluded from the day to day nursery life - no classes / no meals etc

We always had to pay for AM session, PM session or whole day rates, regardless of when we dropped off or picked up. The idea of only paying for the specific hours each day you want seems alien to me.

It always made sense to me because it's not like the nursery could have taken another child for the 7-8am hour that we chose not to use from the morning session.

Ours is quite a big nursery and you have the option to pay for virtually any combo of hours. They just get more staff in on days when there are more kids there for early or late sessions. So a core short day is 8-4, a core long day is 8-6. You can tag on 30 mins at the beginning of the day to start at 7.30, or at the end of the day to pick up at 6.30pm. And you can also do half days. You pay for the hours you choose.
I often see one or two staff leaving at 4pm as quite a few kids go home then, while other staff stay until 6 or 6.30

DC goes 2 x a week & we only qualify for 10 hours free, I presume our costs with halve or thereabouts

Seems fair enough to me. They probably have 30 free hour slots. If you don't use it all it will be a pain to find someone to fill up the rest