30 Free Hours but still being asked to pay, is that right?

[EsouthA]

Hi,

I wondered if anyone could help me with the below.

My daughter will start her 30 free hours in September which we have decided to stretch the whole year so works out at 21.9 hours per week.

When applying to her nursery (Busy Bees) we added on one extra morning to make it 20 hours per week. So this we were expecting to be fully covered by the 30 free hours allowance (21.9 hours) however they have come back with this fee sheet which basically broken down means we have to pay a certain amount towards funded hours and also we have to pay for non funded hours which really we shouldn’t have but apparently they are saying we do.
has anyone else experienced this?

With baby no.2 due in October we were hoping in the 30 free hours covering the childcare costs but now we’re looking to reduce my daughters hours so not to pay too much which we just don’t have.

Any advice/experience much appreciated.

Thanks in advance x

Adding to the arbitrary times - even with DCs in secondary or later primary.

Friendship group tiffs. Being called in for incidents. More school trips. Residentials. Meetings about residentials. Being called in for safeguarding eg boy at school showed your DC porn on his phone, girl at school has been self harming and your DC knew about it, school meeting because a child coming home alone was attacked in a park, whole school evacuating because a child came in with a knife. Until recently, twice weekly covid tests with online result reporting.

Expecting that you can just drop your DC off in the school car park at 4am for them to get the coach to France (DCs secondary is 2 miles which isn’t far but with all the suitcases and rucksacks, no public transport running, and having to take all the younger children along? Or send your 12yo DC out alone at 3.30am?)

Cooking ingredients. Gym kits, football boots, dance shoes, wellies. SATs. Lunch passes. Exam schedules. Revision. Homework and more homework. Homework club. School library books. DCs getting home in the dark. DofE. Enough equipment to sink a battleship.

As a childminder I charged £4.50 an hour , but only got £3.50 hour from the government , I only offered the funding term time and charged the parents a £1 per funded hour they used with me and my normal hourly rate for all other times, they were already providing all food, nappies etc. They could use the funded hours when they wanted excluding weekends and bank holidays as I did not work them, if they opted to send their child to a preschool / nursery for some of those hours and I was dropping off and picking up then they had to pay my normal hourly rate for those hours to hold there space.

We also use busy bees. They only let you use 6 hours per full day and 4 hours per half day then there is the tip up for extra hours and food.
We are only using 12 hours over 2 days as it would cost even more for an extra full day (he does 15 hours at school nursery too).
They only allow funding for 9-3.
When my first child was there he did 3 full days term time and we paid £8 for food which was much better for us but hey, what can you do. I imagine it cost them too much to allow that.