Do these fees look about right? How much is the government actually paying for funded childcare

[ChirpyFox]

Any ideas

This is much much cheaper than my nursery charges with funding.

Mine is still hugely expensive. If their fees are £100 for xhrs and the government gives them £20 for x free hours then they still charge you £80. It's a massive con but the government doesn't government them enough money.

But how much is the government giving them? Says £11.06 here https://www.gov.uk/government/news/childcare-settings-receive-cash-boost-as-funding-rates-increase#:~:text=There%20will%20be%20a%20further,%C2%A35.68%20charged%20to%20parents.

Assuming these are costs per week? That looks about right. Although term time only is more expensive than full time

I know a nursery where it's £220 a week without funding so a lot cheaper.

That’s for under 2s and it may well cost a nursery more than that to provide the care.

Which doesn't make sense right

Yeah it would be under 2s

They looks incredibly cheap to me, i think i must be missing something. Below is a copy of my nursery fees (Yorkshire).

Also mine has zero free sessions. So a morning session is 8-12.30. But they'll only use 3hrs free and then they charge £35.47 for the extra 1.5hrs. They don't give an option of just doing the 3hrs.

A nursery not far away is £220 a week before free hours so I don't think it's cheap

Yeh about what I'll be paying from September for 2 days for a 1 year old at a school run nursery

Actually just realised that's per day. I'm paying that per month!

Mine is £420 a week with no funding. £227 a week with the 30hrs funding.

I'm in the midlands, not a fancy area.

My photo doesn't seem to show up, so i have copied costs below. This is the monthly cost.

Full price
No Funding
1 Full Day - £340.00
2 Full Days - £680.00
3 Full Days - £1,020.00
4 Full Days - £1,360.00
5 Full Days - £1,615.00

15 Hours Funded
11 Stretched
1 Full Day - £89.25
2 Full Days - £404.18
3 Full Days - £744.18
4 Full Days - £1,084.18
5 Full Days - £1,352.97

30 Hours Funded
22 Stretched
1 Full Day - £89.25
2 Full Days - £178.50
3 Full Days - £468.35
4 Full Days - £808.35
5 Full Days - £1,090.93

How many hours of care does "full time" cover?

If they are open for 11 hours a day, 5 days a week all year around then that's a bit over 2,800 hours of childcare in a year. The "15 hour" grant is only for 585 hours in a year so that's about 20% of the hours, so a full time place shouldn't be more than 20% discounted with the 15 hour grant.

If they are open 10 hours a day that's 2550 hours a year so the free hours on a 15hrx39 week grant are about 23%.

I'm not going to calculate every possible permutation but it's not seeming unreasonable to me. They can't usually take on a different child for the bits you don't want

Of course not. How would they pavkage and sell the free space to offer some other child a space from 8:00 to 9:30 or from 11:00 to 12:30 in order to run at full capacity? They still have their rent and bills and staff costs to pay, and they can't employ 5/6ths of a person if they need one staff member per six children and one child goes home early, they don't have any reduction in staffing costs, so they need to charge for the full length of time they are open for each of the 10 half-days in a week. And if they are open 51 weeks a year it's not 3hrs anyway, it's only 2.3 hrs that they are getting funding for, because there is zero demand for school-holiday-time-only nursery places.

It’s mental my son got the 15 hrs 2 year funding and 30 hours 3 year funding in 2017-2019 . I never paid a penny extra.
But even now at the nursery he attended their non funded day fee is £43, and they ask for a £7 per day contribution per day for funded hours and it isn’t enforced.
they were also extremely flexible about how hours were taken, I did 2 x 7.5 hours per week term time only fir the 15 hours. For the 30 hours we did 18 hours in term time and 1 full day (8-5) in the holidays.

I did say it was because the government didn't cover the costs.

But there's actually quite a lot of nurseries that seem to manage it, many just ask for a small supplement to cover consumables of under £10 a day.

There is also very high demand for term time only around here. The nursery i use, closes 2 rooms and often has only 1/3 of staff working school holidays. If you have older children then there's no need for year round childcare.

@RabbitsEatPancakes I said there's no demand for school holiday only places. Some nurseries are able to offer term timeonly places but staffing isn't the only cost, rent and bills need to be paid in holiday time too which is why it's sensible for the nursery to charge more for term-time-only places. Nurseries can make a profit if run at full capacity. It's easy enough to allow a 2- or 3- day a week place, and to have half days, because it's easy to sell the unused capacity to a different customer. The same isn't true for having shorter days or term-time-only as the unused capacity can't be sold to someone else and the empty space still has a cost to run. The nurseries that give a lot of flexibility without charging for it will go out of business sooner than the ones who are able to calculate the additional costs of offering that flexibility.

That does not reflect what every setting receives, its averages. Depending on the local authority, the amount they receive fluctuates quite a bit. I live in an area which pays one of the least amounts but I’m in the south east in an area that you would presume would get much more for funding. 1/4 a mile up the road, settings receive £1 extra per hour than my area does as I live on a border.

Might do because they hold the place all year but I ly charge during term time so the difference acts like a holding fee

That’s insanely cheap compared to nurseries around me.

We did have one that lowballed everyone else and charged £270 a month when the funding first came in, but they then increased the price 5 times in the next two years, rebranded because of the bad feeling and now charge comparably to the others.