Hi everyone,
I was wondering if anyone here has ever used the Universal Credit childcare scheme for holiday clubs?
I run coding and robotics clubs for kids aged 8 – 12, and recently we became Ofsted registered. Parents can now take advantage of Universal Credit Childcare scheme on our after school clubs and our holiday clubs too. But interestingly, for the few months we’ve been registered, we haven’t had a single parent take up the scheme or even inquire about it.
During the spring term only one parent mentioned the scheme, but this was halfway through the term where she said that she would rather pay for our sessions and use the scheme for her sons football sessions because the football sessions cost more as a whole compared to our sessions.
Our leaflets and advertisements clearly show that we offer the scheme for parents to utilise, so I don’t think that parents are unaware, but I do think that we are not able to find parents with the scheme.
Our sign-up page on our website doesn’t state the scheme as we are still unsure on what to put on the page for parents to fill out. The leaflets are attached, and below is a link to our sign up page.
https://www.i2tech.co.uk/holiday-club-brookfield-primary/
Eventually parents will be able to fill out the form with the relevant Childcare Scheme information, so for now the information is just on the leaflets
I obviously can’t ask parents directly about their situation, but I really do want to help as many people as possible. The aim is to eventually become government funded, that way parents don’t incur any costs at all. But in order to get to that stage we have to get consistent Childcare Scheme sign ups month on month. I’m a bit stuck on how to even let people know that we offer that option, or whether I’m missing something obvious?
We’ve got our Easter Holiday Clubs starting next week in two locations, Morden and Sutton, and we still have a few spaces left for them. The registration deadline is tomorrow (but payment deadline ends a little later) and I’d really love to make it more accessible if possible, but currently we still have no registrations with interest in the Childcare Scheme.
I would really appreciate any insight from anyone who’s used the scheme before, or knows how parents usually find out about it so that going forward we can increase the sign we can better help accommodate all parents.
Thank you!