Nursery Funding when the child turns 3

[frolicmum]

I always thought you get 30h for free the term after your child turns 3.
If you send your child to nursery for 3 days, why do you "only" save £240 (looking at the table) or might I be misunderstanding the fees? I might be naive here but I didn't realise the drop of fees wouldn't be more substantial.

The free hours are term time only (38 weeks a year) so if it's a 52 week nursery they usually pro-rata the reduction across the year and it doesn't work out that much.

Plus if they're in for a full day they can also charge for lunch/lunch cover

Yep as above. Plus my nursery only lets you use the free hours between 9am and 3pm. You have to pay the hourly rate for dropping off before 9 and every hour after 3. So if you drop off at 8.45 and pick up at 5.15 you have to pay for a full 4 hours more per day. It adds up quickly.

Gosh, that's still a lot. My son is in full year nursery 3.5 days a week, 2.5 days are funded and we pay roughly £170 per month.

So the automatic entitlement is to 570 hours per year , which is 15 hours a week on term time only basis but actually closer to 10 hours a week on a calendar basis, which is obviously 1 day. That means assuming you are in 3 days then there are 2 days still left to pay for, at about 64 pounds a day times weeks this is 517 pounds and the rest will be food charge etc. The 64 pounds was calculated by saying 775/(3x4) =64.58 to give the effective day rate prior to them turning 3.

Have they based on in the 15 hour funding that everyone is entitled to instead of the 30 hour that not everyone can get? If so, and if you can get the 30 hr, you’ll save more. Though as others have said the funding is based on term time so if they go year round it only covers 11 or 22 hours.

No useful information but they are not free they are funded (and not funded properly as I get around £4.36 per 3 year old with some areas getting considerably less).

At my nursery you can only claim for 6 hours max a day, so have to pay full price for the others.
Spread over 52 weeks as pp said above.

Thanks everyone! This makes sense.

@Ginger1982 it's a Montessori nursery and we're in London (zone 4 but still, they're all about the same). The most expensive one we visited was bright horizons (£87 per day) and I loved it on paper but then we actually started settling and it just didn't feel right.

We still ended up paying around £40 a day for ours even with free hours. I know one person who has fully free nursery but I’ve never known anyone else to get that in a full day setting. I’d rather pay the extra and have decent food/proper pay going to staff especially at the moment when they’re having to do extra cleaning etc. The whole slogan of free hours is a massive con really.

I guess it’s the area... our nursery bill would be £600 a month for 3 days for one child but actually it’s £243 after funding. We have twins so £486 instead of £1200 is worth me working again!

Ask for a full breakdown of the calculation if its spread across the year you should get 22 hours a week if open all year. They may offer 2 lots 9f 3 hours a day with lunch in between ....but you should get the option to go home have packed lunch etc

Funded hours can only be used for certain hours in most nurseries so the rest get paid for by the parent as usual.

The government promoted it as free hours but then massively underfunded the scheme leaving nurseries to have to be creative in finding ways to claw enough money in to stay open. One of the consequences of that is the limited hours per day the funding can be applied. It’s also only paid term time so holidays are paid for by the parent. Funding can be stretched over a year but it means parents pay a bit more weekly.

After reading this thread I checked our nursery and they insist they attend at least 4 full days of you're using 30hours with them. So nursery bill actually goes UP once finding kicks in (but she gets an extra 1.5days that we don't want/need 🙄)