"Free" 15 hours of childcare at childminder's

[happymumofthreeboys]

My childminder has said that she can only claim up to something like £3.90 per hour for my son once he's entitled to the 15 free hours of childcare after Easter. So she will still be charging me the difference per hour. It's not a huge amount but this is child number 3 for me and I've not had to do this before. Is it quite common? And what if she's not applying this rule to all the children in her care?

I didn't think that was allowed. My understanding is the 15 hours has to be provided free, they can charge for any meals in that time and obviously charge as normal for any hours above that.

The amount she receives from the government doesn't cover her hourly rate
This is why many Cms and some nurseries are no longer offering the funded hours
Why should she take a financial hit?

Will follow this as our cm has said the same. I've previously used nurseries and know they cannot charge top ups, but was unsure about cm's.

No she isnt allowed to charge a top up for those hours so she either doesnt offer the free 15hrs per termtime week or she offers them and accepts it is at a reduced fee.

I do know nurseries and CMs who have increased their general hourly rate to tale into accpount the shortfall, or they have started charging for meals etc. Its essentially the same but "allowed" even if morally wrong.

My CM doesnt offer the free hours, and this is just one of the reasons why. I still use her as she is amazing. DD then uses her hours for Pre School.

She isn't allowed to charge top ups. If it doesn't cover her fee (and the funding is so low that's not surprising) then she is better off not claiming it at all.

She probably feels she is trying to do you a favour by dealing with the claim paperwork in order to get you a discount but if you don't see it that way and the rules are on your side then she is better off out of it.

As others said, not allowed. She either offers the hours and takes the hit or she doesn't offer them.

Not a childminder but nursery manger. Our local authority Early Years Team worked with me to set up our funding model and actively encouraged us to charge top ups, but in a way that it didn't appear on paper to be a top up.

So if the session we offered was 4 hours long, the Business Advisor told us one way of offering the funding was to increase the session by a quarter of an hour and have the first four hours free, with the "top up" being invoiced for the not-funded remaining 15 minutes.

I think it was an entirely pragmatic response on her part. The funding doesn't cover most nurseries hourly costs and from what she was saying, they would rather have providers offering the funding in a viable way than to it opt out of offering the funding at all.

This is such a difficult one for childminders. A friend of mine who is a cm working in London charges £7ph if she takes a funded child the government pay her £3.90 for those 15 funded hours, she has a waiting list of parents wanting to use her services. She is not allowed to charge the extra top up for those 15 hours. It is just not practical for her to offer funded places when she could fill that space with a full paying charge.
Round here it's a bit different as the going rate is more like £5 per hour so the difference is not so great.
You are not allowed as a childminder to directly charge a 'top up' so I can't just invoice an extra £1.10 an hour. How most childminders and nurseries cope is by either upping hourly fees at 3yrs or by charging for meals or activities on top of the hourly fees. So for me in a day I might lose out on £11 but I could charge a £6 meal fee and £5 for activities.
As it stands I don't offer funded places. It's too complicated and fraught with problems. I encourage parents to send to the local preschool and I don't charge for the time they are attending. So my older children are on lower fees and the hours at preschool are funded.

The trouble is that pre-schools are also hitting a crunch point, their rent, lighting, heating etc as well as minimum wage are all going up much faster than the funding. It's quite scary when some political parties are throwing around the ideas of increasing the number of 'free' hours but not talking about increasing the funding rate to meet the increasing costs.

As others have said, she can't charge for the funded hours, but can charge whatever she likes for the other hours.

She's offering the funded hours to give you a chance to get a reduction in fees, because otherwise you'd have to pay full fee. There's nothing in it for the cm.

What's morally wrong is the government spouting nonsense about free places and free school meals without paying properly for them.

Completely agree with HSMM!

We currently offer the free entitlement but we are revising our fees and DH is adamant we have to stop the funding. I don't want to: I've always believed in the free entitlement for every child, but we are now having too many people playing the system by dropping their hours to only the funded hours and blocking the full time place.

We don't do top-ups and we can't afford to carry on like this. Question is, how do we allow the full time claimants and stop the system players?
The free entitlement was never intended to facilitate career breaks and "me time".

Interesting as I'm a cm who has been asked to register for funding but always avoided it for the same reason ie government rate is £2.10ph less than my rate. I've explained to mum that the only way I'd consider doing it is by offering sessional rates as the nursery manager above suggests to make up the shortfall in funding - only sent it last night so yet to hear her response! The way I'm proposing is:

Child comes to me 3 days a week 8-6pm & usual weekly charge is £180 @ £6ph. If I were to offer funding I would offer as follows:

8-9am breakfast session £10.50
9-2pm: 5 hours fully funded (free to mum earning me £19.50)
2-6pm afternoon session inc lunch & tea £30

New cost to mum £121.50pw (£40.50/day) saving her £58.50 a week but still earning me the same amount. The only downside is I can't insist that she does the before or after sessions (as the funded hours have to available free without tie-ins) so if she did drop them & just use me for funded hours I'd have to give notice as my pre-school spaces are too precious (& demand high enough) not to earn full fee.

Funnily enough, I remember when my dc were at nursery & got funding for 15 hours but we paid something like £18 for 15 minutes lunch session (& we provided food) and I remember been perplexed & incensed about it! No one ever explained why they charged this high figure although tbh even if they did I don't suppose I would have been any less forgiving so I do appreciate this isn't going to be popular with parents.

phoebemcpeepee you might be pleasantly surprised - I'm very upfront about why we deliver the funding the way we do, and explain why we essentially top up the free hours and I've not had a negative reaction yet.

I do also inform all propective parents that there are local providers who do offer the funded hours completely free so that they can consider all their options but most sign up with us as they understand about the shortfall from the government funding and can see that we would not be able to provide what we do (significantly higher staff:child ratios etc) if we were only in receipt of £3.98 an hour.

I had an audit and I openly told them that if parents start requesting free hours with no additional hours, I will withdraw the offer. I can't afford it.

No she's not allowed to. The nursery gets round this by not charging 'top ups' for the free hours, but charging higher amounts than they would otherwise for other hours. This is allowed, unfortunately

Edit: should say our nursery, not the nursery