My DTs have just turned 3. They currently attend a nursery 2 mornings per week, which DH and I pay for. Now that they are 3, they are entitled to 15 hours free nursery education (so I thought. BTW it's 15 hours where we live, I know it's 12 1/2 in other areas) So we bumped up their nursery hours to 3 mornings - a total of 12 3/4 hours. HOWEVER, I now understand that the free bit is only 3 hours per day, up to a cost of £3.25 an hour (changes from LEA to LEA, I think) which means that it's not free at all. We also get the pre-tax voucher things, but we're still paying much more than we were expecting. Nursery didn't tell us ANY of this either - we got the September bill, were confused, then spent hours trying to find the info on the internet.
Just wanted to say GRRRRRR.