Early years funding and holidays

[Bingtata]

At DD's nursery, if you book a holiday you get charged 50% of normal fee per day. If you recieve early years funding, they stop this for the days you are on holiday, so it effectively costs me more to take DD on holiday than normal monthly fees with early years funding. Is this normal practice? Does the funding to them actually stop when I take DD on holiday? What if she was sick?

It depends on the local authority. In mine they don't really mind for a week or two and will carry on paying.

We've had the issue of children going away for extended holidays to visit family and the 'official' advice I've been given is to keep the funding, but if a child joins who has missed the census date but would have been eligable for funding then to use the funding the child on holiday for the new child (does that even make sense?).

However, I know that some LAs are really strict and will claw back funding for children who are away for more than just a day or two.

Thank you Tidybush. I've just found Devon County Council website and it says that the funding will continue for sickness or holidays, would only stop for prolonged or repeated absences? So I would think a single 2 week period in a year would be reasonable under that guidance?

You might want to look at the threads in this forum about the changes to funding that came into effect from 1Sept. I'm not expert on this, as some of the other posters are, but it seems that spreading the cost reduction over a whole year may no longer be permissible. This might solve your immediate problem, if your holiday is outside the designated "funded weeks", but as the ramifications of the latest changes are not yet well understood, it might come back and bite in other ways.