Nursery fees for the over 3s

[colvinho]

Hi

Hope you don't mind a Dad posting a question here.

I just want to check that my child's nursery has fair charges.

For under 3s, full time at the nursery is £1240 per term. That is for 19 hours per week. (so £63 per hour)

Foolishly perhaps, I was getting excited now that my daughter has turned 3 and would be therefore entitled to 15 hours free because of government provision.

However, I have now found out that full time (still 19 hours per week) for over 3s is £545 per term. So those 4 hours are £136 per hour.

The charge is justified as '4 hours education plus enhancements to the basic provision'. I am not sure what these enhancements are.

What would be helpful for me is to know if other nurseries have similar charges for over 3s or is this an unusually high charge? I don't mind paying if this is in line with what other nurseries do.

It is a good nursery.

Any comments appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Ian

I know that ours doesn't charge for "enhancements", they just charge their standard hourly rate for additional hours. However their hourly rate is quit high, so I think that there is an element of making up the shortfall from government funding, but not from that particular child. So some children just do 15 hours with no cost and some are too young to be funded and pay the full rate. We are in the latter category and it is painful.

The 15 hours should be free at the point of delivery, but unfortunately the rate of funding per hour is quite low and so many nurseries do charge more in this way.

If you are in an area of high demand for childcare then probably you have to just put up with it. My own nursery used to charge £700 plus for two days per week, for over twos - in London. When he turned three I got a £150 rebate per month. However, if I had gone to them and demanded my 15 hours free at the point of delivery, I know that they would have just laughed and pointed to the waiting list!

Our nursery deducts what the government gives them for the 15 hours from our total fees. So our fees are approx £1500 a term and we get an approx £700 reduction which results in us paying the remaining £800. I hope that makes sense!

We don't have an issue with this at all as we actually get 25 hours of child care for this rate and the nursery offers so much more than most local nurseries. I think it is normal to pay the extra if you are at a good nursery offering more than the basic child care.

Legally they can't charge enhancements - the 15 hours have to be free.

My DS goes to nursery 26 hours a week. We pay for lunch and tea and the extra 11 hours at about £4 an hour.

19 hours a week sounds very low for that price!

I'm in central London and was paying £900 a month for 35 hours a week (9am - 4pm) for the local private nursery.

The 15 hours a week free from 3 we never actually took up as some of our local primary schools have attached nurseries that do 9am - 3.15pm for free and we were lucky enough to get a place there.

Had we not had that place, the private nursery charged around £500 a month instead.

They are meant to give the 15 hours per week free to parents with no top-ups, compulsory extra hours or rate changes for extra hours.

That is how it is meant to be but the funding is unrealistically low so if they did that then they'd be out of business. Many nurseries break the rules because if they didn't they'd have to drop out of the scheme and there would be no discount at all.

My ds is at a preschool. Their sessional rate for 3 hours is higher than the government allowance, which I believe is about £13 or £14 for 3 hours.

For 3 mornings it is about £1000 a term. The government funding works out at about £490 and we pay a top up of about £510.

Lots of places do this and as far as I know they are allowed to. We're happy to pay the top up as we want to go to that preschool and if we didn't get the discount we'd have to pay even more......

£1240 per term sounds cheap to me. How many terms have they got in a year? If they've got three terms (spring, summer, autumn) then that's 13 weeks per term, so the hourly charge is £5 per hour.

You're now only paying £2.20 for the other hours, sounds fair to me.

Solve I'm glad you said that as the £63 looked unusually high to me!

Ours does it a different way, our nursery works out your term entitlement in £ and then divides it by 3

So 13 wks x15 hours x cost all divided by 3. This is what happens when your child is there for 52 weeks a year as they were finding that if they did it based on exact hours by terms parents were having a big sack of a bill in August and thus not happy. I works out about £150 a month rebate I think. When ds 2 turns three he will be dropping his hours to 16 p.w currently does 27 as I work, but will be stopping for maternity leave, the nursery have agreed to this but as I'm at home with him I will have to work more in line with what they want rather than what I want as they're obviously loosing ds so will want to replace him.

To be honest though its the best nursery locally which isn't extortionate prices so I'm happy to go with what they can provide at the cost.

I used to pay around £1700 a term
The "15 hrs free" was worth only about £600 a term so the bill was then still over £1000

For London this is quite normal!

The costs at the preschool my daughter went to were higher than the grant awarded by the government, so we were all asked to pay a "voluntary" top up each term.

Without the top up, they wouldn't have been able to afford the excellent staff ratios, and highly trained staff that made the preschool so good.

My DS goes to preschool for 28hrs a week. We pay £2300 per term after free hours have been deducted!! It's about 182 hours that are paid- at around £12.50 p/h.

It's an amazing preschool though so I think it is well worth the money.

Our LA had rules that the 15 hours had to be spread at least over 3 days so our old nursery would charge for 3 half days and 2 full days, which came almost up to what 5 days a week cost anyway. That was the intention anyway, actually they miscalculated the fees and managed to pull out a figure which was much closer to what I thought was fair, e.g. 3/5ths of the full time fee. I ddin't tell them :)