Nursery charging top up fee.

[Snsausage686]

I'm on the committee as a trustee and secretary for my local preschool.
Our manager has recently expressed she wants to introduce a top up fee.
By this I mean that the government offer £4 per child per hour for children funded at 15 or 3o hours.
She wants to then charge parents the difference to our normal hourly rate.
So for us, we charge £7 per hour so parents would be paying £3 per hour or £9 per 3 hourly session even if their child gets 15 or 30 hours free childcare.

I, from a trustee point of view think brilliant, extra money coming in.
As a parent, I would struggle to pay the extra they are wanting to charge and would actually reduce my child's hours because of it.

What I want to know is firstly is this allowed? Can they do it? I can't find a definitive answer online.

And secondly, would you as a parent be willing to pay that?
We are already struggling as we are a charity run preschool so this was an option to bring in extra money but I feel it may have the opposite affect, pushing parents elsewhere because they have to pay more.
Thanks for reading!

I don't think I could pay £3 an hour. If ours introduced this I could because the fees are only £5ph and I think they get £4 so I could afford £1 extra. Ours are lovely and don't charge extra at all (although parents provide lunch and I assume nappies) but funds are starting to get tighter so I can see them needing to charge for something soon.

It is completely nursery dependent, for the 30 hours our nursery offers it as 3 x full days only - on these funded days you pay £7.50 for meals (breakfast, 2 x snack, lunch and a light tea) DS has always done 3 full days anyway so our bill, during term time, has reduced from £47.50/day to £7.50 a day - huge difference for us, I still budget for the full fees in holidays though.

People on funded care don’t get extras like food and nappies and if they keep ignoring that rule you can either work it two ways from what I have seen - three strikes and you’re out (ie the child is expelled) or allow the parent to go into debt for the extras and then either arrange monthly payments or expel and get them to court. A lot of private nurseries, also, don’t allow funded kids to purchase anything and if the parent doesn’t provide nappies etc they are called in immediately to pick them up (or social services are called if they ignore the call). There are also a strictly enforced number of funded places available and when they’re gone they’re gone.

So yes the rules behind funded kids do tend to be stricter at most nurseries.

At my dd's pre school it became free for us when she turned 3, it was term time only and she only did 12 hours a week. I th ink it's pretty common to charge for snacks/ extras etc though, the funding is inadequate and only term time so nurseries just can't manage on it. I think you're right, adding £3 an hour would certainly cause less well off families to reduce their dc's hours.

The chances are if you don't pay the preschool will go under. Then you won't have anything to pay for. This funded 30hours is bringing early years to its knees.

If parents have been paying £7/hr and suddenly only have to pay £3/hr, they will love the reduction. It sounds like your nursery tried to offer the funded hours completely free and have realised they simply can't afford to do it. This will make it seem more for people who have been getting free hours.

The government have happily offered free time to everyone, without actually paying for it.

Without wishing to be rude, I find your manager’s and committee's ignorance of the funding rules deeply worrying, and I think you should too. The ban on top-up fees is such a basic central tenet of the scheme, I find it hard to believe anyone could have read your local authority’s funding agreement without knowing that.

That would make me seriously question the manager’s/committee's competence in matters of business and governance. I just can’t help wondering what else they don’t know and whether the organisation as a whole really knows what they are doing. I honestly would not want to sit on that committee as you could be open to all sorts of liability issues.

On the issue of childcare costing "too much" , I fear parents, politicians and to some extent childcare providers have all been living in a fool’s paradise for too long.

A lot is spoken about the funding rates being lower than regular fees. But the real 'elephant in the room' is that those regular fees are far too low in the first place, if we want nurseries and other childcare providers to stay open. Over time, fees have remained stagnant, despite the fact that costs have risen. There have been particularly rapid increases in the cost of commercial rent, business rates, minimum wages and training (as well as increasing demands for more staff to have more and higher qualifications.) At the same time, the proportion of the fees actually paid by families has fallen, due to the numerous government help schemes.

An independent economic survey in 2018 concluded that childcare providers need to be charging a minimum of £7.35ph in order to provide reasonable standards and remain financially sustainable over time, allowing for demographic fluctuations. That figure is probably now a little on the low side, given the promises made by the main political parties about significant increases to national/living wage thresholds.

There has to be an option of it being completely free at point of use - ie we do set sessions with no flexibility for children who only want to access funded sessions.

However our more flexible sessions require a £1 hr contribution. This allows parents to stretch their funding out of the 9-12 12-3 sessions and change days if required etc.

The majority of our parents pay the contribution for the flexible option but we do have a couple who only do the 15hr full funded.

The funding levels are completely different to the real cost of providing a place and our nursery struggles with this.

Our nursery offers meals and snacks for an extra 50p per hour that the child is there, but this is optional. We use our 30 funded hours and then supply his food and snacks.