You might lose your free hours for your 3/4 year old

[merryberry]

The Early Years Funding Single Formula for ?free? 3 and 4 year old childcare is supposed to be rolling out across England next month.
A statutory increase from 12.5 to 15 hours of free childcare is supposed to be on offer.

However, you may find like me that your nursery or pre-school or childminder says they cannot operate under the new code for one simple reason ? they are not supposed to charge top up fees and that in fact your early years free childcare is now vanishing. They are supposed to offer completely free places only. Given that the funding is for each hour is under £4, you can see what is going to happen in other settings like my DS2?s.

Either you pay full cost, you find/set up cheaper childcare provision yourself or you withdraw your child and get back into the home. I am spitting teeth over this.

Personally, I?d rather it was just bloody cut with a decent notice period to it so I could plan for it. Not warned in Mid-Feb by DS2?s place that they ?think but not sure that we will have to withdraw from the scheme from April, but the LA doesn?t know what?s going on but the figures dictate that if the code is implemented as written, they will go bust within 17 weeks?.

As childcare providers around the country have found, each local authority is taking different approaches to various issues, like interpreting ?when is a top up charge not a top up charge? to try and keep places open and parents in work. It?s a mess and it seems there is actually going to be a review of this over the next few weeks.

Please add yourself to this petition to add information and weight to the call for a rethink on this.

Please forgive me cross-posting, I'm popping this in the relevant pre-school topic areas.

Hi :)

The 3-4 year old funding has always been a lot less (in most places) than the actual charge of paying staff insurance ect for nurseries around the country and i know of a lot of places that have gone bankrupt over this because its hard to keep a place open when the books do not balance

The reality is a lot of places will stop accepting the funding and running the setting with out it and the places that do offer the funding will be filled very fast but that is what happens when the country is millions of pounds in debt something has to give

The funding works like this

Each setting has to be able to offer 15 hours of free funding per week without charging for it this means the setting could say accept it in the morning session (whatever time they may use ) 9.00-12.00, 8.30-11.30 9.30-12.30 ect and just offer the morning session for funding and if you wanted a all day space you would have to pay from the time the funding finished ect same in the evening i know some settings offering the funding only in the afternoon from 1.30-4.30 and if they want a all day space you have to pay for it so check what different settings are doing so you dont gt caught out by any charges.
It is rare to find a setting accepting funding all day (9-3) but there is still a few so grab those spaces while you can

so basically while you can still get it get it and dont fret over things that could happen there has always been kinks with the funding system and nurseries have always somehow made it through semi unscathed

tbh, i'm going to sit around an extra year with my thumb up me arse earning under the tax threshold due to the change, rather than be back in substantive and creative and income generating earning.

i'm not sending ds2 to any setting less good than the one he's in now.

Can someone please explain this to me in very simple terms - I can't follow it. My son is at FT nursery. We used to get say £60 I think off a months fees. The nursey is now no longer taking part in scheme as of September. Why? If someone can explain this in easy enough terms for me to understand I can work out if we should be splitting his care between 2 providers maybe? How is anyone going to be able to benefit from this scheme now? Thanks

basically the goverment give the nursery say £2.70 a hour for a space the nursery charges £4.00 a hour for.
the nursery loses money on each child they accept from the funding.
The nursery used to be able to charge a top up so they could still run the funded sessions but they are now not allowed to so some nurseries wont accept the funding and will now only take paying parents so they do not make a loss on each place

This is happening more and more as it is not benificial for the nurseries to offer these funded places to make a loss on each one especially with insurance premiums going through the roof for nurseries and general costs going up and in order to stay open they stop accepting the funding

You can still claim 15 hours somewhere else if they have space and accept the funding but you would have to claim them at another nursery as you can not make a nursery accept the funding

Hope this was easy enough to understand :)

It's the £60 off you mentioned. Invoices can no longer show the money you get back for government funding. You have to have 15 hours completely free and then get charged normal hourly rate for the remaining hours, which means the nursery/Childminder/whatever, may get a reduced rate of income for those 15 hours.

Our community nursery will still allow the 15 hours free funding. But being a community nursery, we have to do a heck of a lot of fundraising to make it work. The money we receive from the government only just covers running costs. Anything extra such as training and equipment has to be covered with fundraising.