Nursery 9 months 15 hours childcare funding

[Overthebow]

Can I ask how much does the 15 hours, or 11.2 hours stretched across the year, funding take off your total nursery bill?

There are different government rates per age group and I'm pretty sure our nursery are averaging the rates for everyone and so our funding for our 1 year old is less than it should be. The funding for 9 months - 2 years is roughly £12 an hour but we have £8.50 per hour (for 11.2 hours a week) taken off the bill.

WIBU to bring this up with the nursery?

anyone else have this issue at nursery?

This is the only way a lot of settings can stay in business! They average it out as the 3 year old funding is terrible (locally it's just over £4 and hour).

You can speak to them, but they won't change their policy i can assure you. You are free to find another setting who may take the full amount off.

As above it will be policy & the only way they can afford to run it basically.

Just to say some local authorities do pay a higher rate. The 3/4 year old rate round by just is over £6 per hour. I believe the local authority can pocket some of the government allocated amount therefore I wouldn't be certain that the nursery is receiving the full amount,nin fact they almost certainly won't be.

But yes settings can essentially apply it how they like.
Some will let you use the hours anytime, some only between 9 and 11 and then between 2 and 4 for example
Some round by us wont allow hours to be used on a Wednesday as that is the mid-week busy period for them.

When I ran a pre school we didn’t stretch it. If you were funded you were funded no additional bill. However it was only term time pre school. £8.50 feels like a more likely funding rate than £12 to me but it’s been a while. Can you google what your local rate is?

The entitlement is free hours, not £12/hr off your bill, so whatever the usual hourly (non funded) rate/hour (£8.50?) X 15 should be taken off your bill.

It doesn't matter that 9 month funding is a lot more (and that amount should be between the LA and childcare provider and not the parent) then 3 year old, because the ratios are different too.

Nurseries can have 8 x 3/4 year old to one staff member, which would earn them around £40/hr in funding by me. They can only have 3 babies under 2 to one staff member, so earning £36/hour, so it's comparable, if that makes sense?

It only makes a difference for childminders really, as we could have 3 1 year old and earn £36/ hr or 3 3 year old and earn £15!

WIBU to bring this up with the nursery?

You can bring up what you want. They need to charge a certain amount to make their business viable, with the piddly amounts the government give them for the funded hours.

A small group of parents complained about the prices of the two nurseries near us, in the hope it would bring the prices down. It didn’t and they both closed within about 6 weeks of each other. This left a load of desperate parents then frantically competing for spaces so they could get to work. I think most of the other parents would have been quite happy carrying on paying what the nurseries were charging.

They will take hours off your bill, not money. There may also be some additional charges applied to the funded hours.

They take the hours off your bill, you don’t get a discounted hourly rate, and you pay the remaining hours. For us it’s done in sessions, so a full day is £52 and a half day is £26. DS goes full time so we get a full day (10hrs) deducted off the bill each week (equalling £52) and a then a half day (5hrs equalling £26), so we only pay £26 for the remaining half and the other 3 full days are charged as usual. On top of this we pay for his lunch extra at £2.70 a day (this is optional as he can take a packed lunch) and the consumable charge of £25 per week (I’m aware this is very cheap and some nurseries charge consumables at £10-20 daily, our old nursery used to). When we can claim the 30 hours we’ll get the equivalent of 3 full days of 10 hours a week taken off the bill and we’ll pay for the remaining 2 plus the consumable charge and any extras (nursery meals etc).

I asked our nursery how it would work out before we claimed the hours and they said they honestly didn’t know until the invoice is generated, as it all went through a system which worked it out for them once we gave them his code.

Edited to add - this isn’t stretched as we do term time only now. His old nursery was stretched (we didn’t claim hours then) but they said it would have been worked out the same and he’d have just got less hours deducted a week (eg. 10 hours and not 15).

Who says the funded rate nursery received is £12/hour for 2 year olds? It certainly isn’t in my area

The rates are available online and differ in each area.

For 9 months + in my area it is the rate. All the rates are available online.

What is the hourly rate? As in, is it £8.50 because if so that's correct. I've no idea what the nursery received for my DS, we just got billed for the hours over and above.

At our nursery, 15 hours of funding saves us around £240 a month. Our normal day rate is £75 a day and we pay £2 an hour/£20 for the day that the funding covers.

That's for my 3 year old who goes 3 days a week, but would be the same discount regardless.