AIBU to feel annoyed about ‘free childcare’

[CoolMoose]

My 2yo has just started to receive the ‘free’ 15 hours. AIBU to feel like it’s such a joke?! He attends full time at nursery and our bill has reduced from £1600 a month to just shy of £1400 a month (£240 a month reduction). They only offer the funding stretched (you can’t just access the free childcare) and you have to pay for ‘add on’ costs. It’s £15 a day for food….a 2yo doesn’t eat that much, surely! In addition, you have to pay full fees for bank holiday closures.

I have an older child and this is definitely getting worse and worse for families even with extra government funding. When my older child was little I paid £550-600 a month for full time childcare without funding and about £150-200 a month with funding (10 years ago).

Surely you mean 'other taxpayers', rather than 'the government'? No such thing as government money.

I am not convinced that it is best for the government to decide what my money is spent on. If I kept more of my own hard-earned money, then I could make my own choice about whether to work or stay home.

That’s nurseries for you! I don’t have to pay fees when my son’s childminder is shut for bank holidays and she charges me £2 a day for his lunch (I send his breakfast and tea). We’ve saved quite a bit this month with his 15 free hours, he does only go 3 days but I’m pretty happy.

15 pounds a day for food...are they deliverooing his meal?

It is Tory sound bites with out any substance.

Not ‘free’ at all.

Not really, we get the free hours here and definitely not wealthy - combined household income 35k - and not on benefits.

People make a choice to live a more materialistic lifestyle and therefore work more hours.

If you want to have cars, holidays, smart phones, hairdresser appointments, TV subscriptions, new clothes, new furniture, you will have to work more hours.

People I know who use childcare for under 2s are all relatively well off (otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford it)

15 pound a day for 3 meals plus snacks.. cooked and cleaned by someone else...sounds like pretty good value to me

I'm also shocked at the £15 for food...

The really disgusting thin is people like Gillian Keegan saying- oh nurseries have enough resources, enough people, this works. IT DOESNT!
Nurseries are not getting enough money to offer 15/30h free hours to parents, so add on costs to make up for this. I pay 30% of usual fees for the 'free' day, and I read what nurseries do is not exactly legal, but on hte other hand if they go bust there wont be any childcare to use, so I am happy to pay as it's still a bit of money saved.

But you dont pay for the food, it's just a thing to put on the invoice as they need the money to run the nursery, but can't charge you for it legally.

First of all it’s not free childcare hours.
It has to be paid for somehow.
Nurseries aren’t getting the funding from the govt to cover it properly so they’ve to see to recoup the costs somewhere.
Funded childcare places unfortunately are being funded by parents via other means but hey ho the govt can chirp and boast that they’ve given so many funded childcare places but they fail to mention how little funding they’ve provided for this and what the knock on effects are

Its not the government who pays though - its tax payers who pay.

Shame you had to resort to name calling in response to a reasonable question.

BTW you have a go at me too - I support good quality affordable childcare provision. Good quality childcare is not just good for the economy but its also excellent for children's development.

I never got to benefit from this at all as when the Scottish government introduced "free childcare" there wasn't actually enough provision for most children to get a space. I had to carry on paying for private nursery. It was a great gimmick for the SNP to bang on about free childcare but hardly anyone got it.

Good question.
Apparently, the tax payer.

It’s not free!! It’s funded. And it’s partially funded. It’s not enough to cover costs.

But it costs the taxpayers NOTHING. Encouraging women back into the workforce by giving them a reduced-cost childcare provision pays for itself in increased taxes paid by those women. Take a career break to look after kids and tot up how much that affects your lifetime earnings. Then look at the tax you would have paid had you earned that higher amount. Then compare to how much the government spend on funding childcare. It pays for itself.

In a lot of parts of the country if you work full time earning an average salary with 2 kids and no subsidised childcare you earn nothing. It all goes on nursery fees. I think it’s scandalous. Don’t we value these average salary workers at all?

This parent blaming has to stop. My child’s (under 2) full time nursery place costs £19,500 a year. 15 years ago the average nursery bill was less than £5k p.a. The average family can’t afford £20k a year in childcare, so yes, it needs to be subsidised or the whole system needs to be replaced. The parents claiming the funded hours are working (that’s a criteria of the funding) and so therefore paying tax. The children will also grow up to work and pay tax. We have a declining birth rate in the country and people are outraged that the tax payers are funding a small proportion of (extortionate) childcare, it defies belief.

My DS just turned 2. Nursery hiked all fees hugely in Jan, I assume to cover the new free hours coming in. Between the fee hike and his ‘free hours’ I’m £90 a month better off for his full time spot now relative to Dec 2023. £90 is better than nothing, don’t get me wrong, but it would hardly be helping me back to work if I wasn’t already.

my son started a new nursery today, because his old one has shut due to the pressure of the funding coming in, and the cost of recruiting and retaining staff. The staff they did have had in most cases been there years and they were in bits on the last day.

I have some insight from the inside too, because while I’m waiting for a new job to start I’ve been temping in a nursery myself. Nurseries currently can’t survive without a temp workforce in most cases. I, as an unqualified (experienced, as I am a nanny, and degree educated in a relevant field, but no official level 2/3/4 in childcare) temp am on £13 an hour, which is still shocking really. But, the qualified room leaders on the permanent payroll are on LESS than this, at about £12 an hour. It’s not right, it’s not fair, and until the childcare sector is valued and funded accordingly this will remain the case. It’s no wonder they attract a lot of young girls using it as a stop gap, or going into it wanting a career but finding that the hours are long, the pay is crap, the admin you’re expected to do on top of childcare duties is ridiculous and it’s not likely to get any better. They leave in droves, which is why today, half the staff at the nursery are drafted in temps.

Our nursery has opted out as they say it's not financially viable for them to offer the 15 hrs for 2 year olds. Plus from 1 April they had a fee increase so I'm actually paying more now than last month 🤷‍♀️ It's so frustrating.

Another example of Tory gaslighting.

It's so frustrating isn't it, we are in a similar situation here.

My little one turned 3 in January, only eligible for the 15 hours funding from April, stretched over the year so they've averaged it to something like 8.9 funded hours per week.
Then with the fee increase on top I'm actually paying more for my monthly bill going forward than I was before we were entitled to any funded hours.
I appreciate I earn well (just over 100k) but I have worked very hard for that, obviously never been eligible for child benefit or tax free childcare etc and that's fine but it pisses me off when the government acts like it's doing us all a favour and these 15 hours are universal when actually it's costing me more!

We don't qualify for the funded hours. I'm fine with that but now our bill is going up £100/month as the nursery raised its fees to cover the shortfall for those who do qualify. It will keep going up as nurseries are likely to be raising costs every six months when more new funded hours start.

The issue to me is not the cost of childcare more so the shit wages in this country. We have been sold such a story as to what we should be allowed to earn.

Yanbu

It’s subsidised childcare and not free at all. It should have been marketed as a subsidy or a flat rate number like £250pm off a full time nursery place.

I think it’s perfectly acceptable for taxpayers to subsidise nursery care - especially when the government refused to help businesses in other ways like dealing with the insane fuel costs of the last few years.

I appreciate I earn well (just over 100k) but I have worked very hard for that you lost me at this sentence- yawn! Only 100k earners work hard.

It has been horribly mis-sold to everyone as "free" hours. Part funded or part subed hours would be more accurate. I wish the government would just be honest about it so people can make proper informed decisions about childcare.