"15 hours free entitlement" and private prep-school fees

[Alanalan20]

Can you help i'm trying to work out how much I would pay for school fees for our 4 year old. the pre-prep fees are £7,362.00 for a year. The school web site states that 3-4year olds are entitled to get 15 hours free and then they pay the remainder.

Anyone know roughly how much the saving will be. I've asked the school but they've not come back to me yet.

At our nursery it doesn't really work out much discount because they take the amount the LEA gives (which is about £3.60 per hour I think) and multiply that by 15 then subtract that from the fees. Given that their actual hourly rate is more like £6 it doesn't really amount to 15 free hours. I'm well aware that this isn't the party line on how it should work, but I do have sympathy for the nursery because they still need to pay their costs for that time.

Oh and remember that the free hours only count during term time, so for 38 weeks a year

(though I guess that is evident if DC is going to a school rather than a nursery)

They are not/not allowed to charge a top up.

They need to work out the hourly rate, and reduce this by the entitled number of hours.

The huge snag in this is that their actual costs almost certainly won't be within the ceiling. So either they have to take a loss (unlikely), do as happens above (breaking terms of the scheme, but many blind eyes turned), or withdraw from the scheme (as more and more are doing).

Check the council - we are Westminster and there is an automatic reduction to the school bills for all children of that age - I cant remember what it was thought - between £150 and 200 I think. Check your local council website.

Just to clarify the plan is to move my daughter from nursery to private pre-school (assuming we can afford it). But based on the responses I've had it looks like private school (5 days a week 9am to 3.30pm) will cost us around £100 a month more than the current nursery fees (2days a week 8am to 6pm).

Thanks everyone, at last the school have just emailed me.

The school fees are £7,362.00
Based on my daughters date of birth the free amount will be £1,400

Amount to pay is £5,963.40