Government's 'free' childcare has caused my childcare to increase by £378 a month!!

[Holdmyrice]

I've been waiting on it as I knew it was coming but we got the letter today highlighting the changes the nursery are going to need to make in order to make the government funding work and keep them afloat!
They used to offer An hourly rate and we used and paid for the hours that best suited us, 8-4. They will no longer offer this and will from April only allow the full day of 8-6 so 2 extra hours we don't need we need to pay for. On top of this, they're now charging a 'quality' fee of £1 for 'free' hours. We provide lunch and nappies and wipes so although I know it's common for nursery to charge for these things once the 'free' hours kick in, ours never have and my 3 year olds 'free' hours were actually free. Not anymore!
And to top it off, they're also raising their basic charge 9.8% in line with NMW increase!

So in total and including taking tax free childcare into account, for my 1 year old and 3 year old I will be paying a grand total of £378 a month more than I am now!!!

It's an amazing nursery and to be clear, I am not angry with them! This is the wretched government who have promised something they never had any intention to deliver! The amount they are paying nurseries for these 'free' hours was never going to be sustainable and frankly, I should probably just feel lucky that my nursery haven't just decided to close their doors!
Thank you very much Tories you absolute twats!

The whole thing was a PR gimmick. As usual the government ignored the professionals in the sector who explained why this would happen, and do bugger all about the underlying issues e.g staff recruitment / retention.

The whole thing was a PR gimmick.

This x 100.

What’s sad is that some people voted Tory because of it! There are still daily threads on here asking when they are going to get their free hours/when their childcare bill will reduce/when their child can start.

The government are well aware that many people only read gimmicky headlines and are pleased if they think it will benefit them. They then don’t bother to think any deeper about what it means or what critics of the policy have to say. If you have read anything over the last year by anyone working in early years, it was crystal clear it was going to be a shambles.

People nitpicking the OP are missing the point entirely, the government have deliberately misrepresented their policy as being a good thing for parents when for many it’s actively making their lives harder. In the middle of a cost of living crisis and recession again not helped by their policies, and the economic disaster of Liz Truss. We need to make noise about this and not let it get swept under the carpet like every other government fuck up. Set up a petition on the government website & write to your MP at the least. And get this shambles of a government out at the next election.

@ruby1957 hahaha you can’t even compare now to the 80s. Times are completely different, you benefited from cheaper house prices, cheaper bills, cheaper food.

anyway, those saying who should pay then? Please have a look at swedens model for childcare and further education. It benefits everyone when childcare is free/affordable and yes, we do need to have children, not just the rich, or society would collapse.

write to your MP at the least

Good advice.

cheaper food

That's actually not true, the proportion of salary spent on food was much higher in the 90s (and before). Food continued to get cheaper after then, mass production, trade deals, improved transport routes etc etc.

No idea why anyone is coming on this thread to talk about "their day" though, what help is that to anyone? It's really boring how these threads have to descend into intergenerational fights.

I understand what you are saying and the government should really have promoted it as contributing £X towards nursery fees rather than the 15 hours nonsense as it clearly doesn’t cover 15 properly paid hours.

I do think your nursery sounds unusual though by allowing you to pick your hours like that. Must make it very inefficient with staffing costs so I’m not surprised they’ve changed it.

Our nursery also offers the free hours from April.

We also got a letter with a massive price increase. They blamed it on the COL crisis and increase in minimum wage, but undoubtedly it has something to do with the free hours to a large extent.

We've been telling you for years! When will you LISTEN TO US!!!

The 30 hours so-called "free" childcare IS NOT FREE! We cannot provide it. The Government is deliberately bribing the electorate with providers' money. They know fine well that the funding has been inadequate. They know fine well that Ofsted and the DofE has overseen a significant drop in childcare places.

We can't get the staff. We can't afford to provide what the Government demands. Ofsted is exacerbating the situation by shutting down providers for ridiculous reasons, and bullying them into closing.

This Government has deliberately broken Early Years. Your children are the ones who are suffering. Foreign shareholders are benefitting at your expense.

When I think of what was provided under the Labour Government! Truly free, high quality Early Years education and well trained Early Years staff and childminders.
Early Years was one of the very first budgets to be cut by the Coalition Government. Perhaps it will help you all to realise how badly Early Years was affected when you remember that LIZ TRUSS was in charge of Early Years at the time and she absolutely, monumentally screwed it right up.
They shoved her over to Environment afterwards, and we all know what that means!

We've had an succession of absolute arseholes in charge of Early Years ever since. I can't even remember who the Early Years minister is at the moment; he or she is yet another a useless waste of space, whoever it is. This Government does not prioritise Early Years.

Of course you're paying more! We told you it would happen and you didn't listen. Well, start believing us now because it's only going to get worse. Poorer quality, difficult to source provision for higher prices.

talking of shareholders

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rishi-sunak-koru-kids-akshata-murty-b2398515.html

The sooner this government are gone, the better.

Yes, yes it was - and this was in the early 2000s.
Once we had 2, I made that terrible mistake of calculating childcare costs for 2 kids Vs my salary and realised that for working 60 hour weeks with high levels of stress, I would have something like £200 a month left after childcare costs. It was insane. I decided to quit my job and my career has never, never recovered.
At the time, I was advised to view these years as ‘investing in my future career’ - because it was typical to not be making any money from it after childcare costs. I was too tired and naive to think it through and properly understand.
Of course, I should have looked at it it terms of shared household costs with my DH and made the calculation based on him paying for one child and me paying for the other (it would have seemed more worthwhile to be bringing in £2.5k or whatever the difference would have been instead of a couple of hundred).
Don’t make this mistake!!

If you look at government policy it’s clear they want everyone at work including mothers of young children therefore in order to facilitate that there needs to be childcare provision for parents. They want to keep social welfare bill low and for people to be paying towards their pensions. It’s in a governments interest to pay towards childcare.

I am not in UK but when our government decided to put money into childcare the childcare providers had to agree not to raise their prices in order to qualify. There has been unintended consequence here in that due to the difference in child ratios across age groups most places no longer take under 1’s because it was easiest way to cut costs. I am grateful that childcare costs have gone down though but some families need childcare from 6 months. The Tories could have looked to see what other countries were doing and based their policy on what works best and tweak it to suit UK system.

when our government decided to put money into childcare the childcare providers had to agree not to raise their prices in order to qualify.

Presumably your government put in a sufficient amount that this was possible?

Presumably you wouldn’t love a 1990 salary? As @ruby1957 says there was precious little childcare available at all in the 70s and 80s. I had to stop work when mine was born and go back part time when he started school. That was the norm then. God knows how I’d have coped with school holidays without my mum.

I've checked (it's a public sector scale so easy to do) and in 1990 my job paid £27820, which is the equivalent of £65482 in today's money. I actually now earn £48423. And pay £88 a day for childcare, not the equivalent of £51 discussed earlier. So yes, I'd take the swap all round! And that's without getting started on the fact that my house cost us £342000 in 2020, but sold for £59950 in 1996...

I personally think it's fair to offer only full or half days and not certain hours - I think this is pretty standard and not abnormal among private nurseries. And the additional £1 fee isn't excessive either.

My nursery will be only allowing you to use hours for a full time place (not term time only, which is what I need as I'm a teacher). As the hours are only funded for term time, I'll be paying full price for hours over the half terms, which I don't actually need as I'm home! Despite this, it'll still cost less to take up the free hours and will mean I have access to nursery during the holidays, if I need.

I had my eldest child in 2004, began attending nursery in mid 2005 and live in the NW. DC attended the most expensive nursery of 5 that I had toured. The full time day rate was £26.50 per day, the other nurseries were around £22-24 per day. Food was provided with no additional charge, all I provided was nappies/wipes change of clothes.

Second DC born in 2010, attended nursery in 2011 the full time day rate was £46 per day, no additional charge for food, nappies and wipes to be provided by parent.

DC 3 born in late 2017 didn’t attend any nursery due to lockdowns, but the full time day rate of the nurseries I enquired to we between £68-£73 per day.

I now have twins, I can’t even begin to fathom how I will manage the childcare fees.

Things to note, my salary did not increase in line with the expense of nursery. I was lucky with my eldest that I had family help so DC only had to attend 3 days per week. By the time I had DC 2 I had set up my own business and DC also only attended nursery 3 days and came to work with me the other 2 days, I had a nice little set up for DC in my office, but people generally are unable to do this. I always thought I had been smart in mitigating my childcare expenses by having DC far apart enough that they shouldn’t need nursery childcare concurrently….then I had twins 🙈

The so called government funding is complete and utter farce! I know many other twin parents and childcare is by far the biggest barrier in returning to work and there are some parents who a going to work and making a loss because of nursery fees, great if you can afford to do this and keep your career going but with the COL crisis, increased mortgages, food and bills it is just not a feasible option for most parents. The government just does not care about it in the least apart from to have an attractive headline to throw at potential voters.

I’m amazed that 20% of voters think you are unreasonable for hoping that the governments childcare plan to save people money wouldn’t make your bill more expensive!!

You have completely missed the point. My husband and I are only just encountering the ‘childcare system’ having had our child in our late 30s. We have worked very hard over the years on our careers, last year (whilst I was on Mat leave also so reduced income) we contributed over £40k in tax alone (not including NI) to the society.

Given we need childcare in order to go back to our jobs, I see this as a core requirement much like building up a pension! Shouldn’t we be allowed to receive some of the tax back we pay to cover our £18k a year childcare cost (that only covers 8-6 and we work much longer hours than that at no overtime payment, it’s expected in our role so we will also need to find and pay a babysitter, pay for earlier start/finish at the nursery). My suggestion to the government was to allow us all to fully salary sacrifice our basic childcare costs (£18k), much like I do with my pension. They have opted for this ‘fare blanket amount’ which just doesn’t work when then have used the lowest hourly rate for childcare they have found in the country as a benchmark for funding. We do not qualify for any ‘free’ hours yet but our nursery fee schedule shows we will need to pay £3.60 per hour top up.

The fact is those on lower incomes that aren’t contributing much, as your thoughts, to the government funding and receive universal credit that heavily subsidise childcare costs (they would get 80% of the £18k paid on a full time job).

What us squeezed middle are looking for is some tax relief, to recognise that we are keeping the economy going through working very very hard with absolutely no relief and have been paying into a government tax system where we actually get nothing back.

And no before people start saying we can afford it, we aren’t particularly high earners in our area. We both do a minimum expected 2.5hours overtime a day plus 2 hour commute time. Our commute also costs us £500 a month!

We never see our child mid-week, it breaks my heart but this is the current situation we are in in order to afford childcare. Reduced 4 day weeks aren’t even recognised as part time working in our companies so you end up doing work on your day off for free and another hour on your working days. Sadly that’s how the corporate world still is, and as there is no job security we are forced to plod along!

I actually wish I hadn’t bothered getting a career and had started a family earlier.

I just don't understand the mentality of offering discounts to NHS employees, who are, on the whole, very well paid despite what the unions and media want us to believe.

"The Tories could have looked to see what other countries were doing and based their policy on what works best and tweak it to suit UK system."

That's what Liz Truss was supposed to do. She had a jolly old time visiting a handful of countries (it was noted that she concentrated on holiday destinations), she visited exactly 6 nurseries and complained they were 'chaotic' (even though Ofsted said they were exemplary), she met up with a couple of childminders in her constituency for coffee and a chat - and that was it.
Her priority was in saving money, not best practice and that was reflected in her choice of countries to visit.

She earned additional money from media writing lots of ill-informed articles, she refused to listen to experienced Early Years experts (one commented that she thought Liz Truss didn't understand a single word of what she was saying) and she produced a woeful couple of unpopular policy reports (Great Childcare and More Great Childcare, I think she called them).

https://www.parenta.com/2013/04/29/liz-truss-forced-reveal-6-official-visits-childcare-settings/

There are literally hundreds of different roles in the NHS. A few are very well paid, many are appallingly paid. Added to which there are numerous vacancies and it’s haemorrhaging staff, any aid to recruitment and retention is very welcome.

And in addition, the support for Early Years has gone too due to wider central government cuts to local authorities.

My LA had a team of early years specialists (30 teachers) who provided quality assurance, training, support to share and improve,where necessary, the care of young children. It built networks of excellent early years providers to share their expertise and support others, so that new staff were well trained, increasing their knowledge and expertise.
EY LA staff carried out regular safeguarding visits to check children’s safety on a regular basis, returning to implement improvements and more training.

LA Early Years specialist teachers also acted as SENCo’s across groups of settings, ensuring best practice for children with SEND. early identification, support to parents and staff.

They worked with the local children’s centre to support parents.

Additionally my LA provided 20 Early Years SEND teachers, who worked with children and parents on a 1-1 basis. Support, intervention, extra capacity alongside providers for the very best outcomes for all children.

Under central government cuts to my LA, everyone of the roles above have gone - no quality assurance, no support to improve, build expertise, share amazing practice. No regular, independent checking if safeguarding.

And my LA has another £5million to save in Children’s Services (social care, vulnerable children and families, improvement, SEND, transport) again this year.

We pay for certain hours - there is a morning session of three hours and an afternoon session of three hours and then an early, a lunch hour and two late hours. So we've always been lucky to pay for 8-4 and save that way. I don't think it's unusual at all, but I do think it's unusual to not pay an hourly top up. We have paid them for every hour (funded or not) since she started (it was 50p, now it's £1.25).

OP I hear you - I am so supportive of bringing in funded hours etc to help working parents but not at the expense of nurseries. I don't benefit either way as DD is too old for the new funding, but for new mums the idea of the hours from 9 months could be a godsend - but only
If the quality of the nursery doesn't suffer, which it will if the income per hour per child is lower due to this change.

https://x.com/bbcpolitics/status/1764225424593129582?s=46&t=XxVwBsRXf-wP03IdqmuUJQ

Well, I’m sure this will reassure everyone! All they need to do is quickly find another 40,000 childcare workers, and it’ll be sorted.