Funded hours spread over the week

[PlanBea]

Hi, the large chain nursery I send my 2 year old to are offering the 15 funded hours (and putting up the daily fees to cover this). They charge £5 a day consumables, £1 for breakfast, £2 for lunch and £2 for dinner - they specifically separated these out in the pricing.

When filling in the paperwork I stated I'd like to use the hours to cover Tuesday (DS attends Tue-Fri), this was fine/nothing was raised. Now I've received my bill, they've applied the hours over the whole week so 2.5ish hours per day, but are now also charging me £5 every single day for food.

It's resulted in a larger bill in April than March, plus £20/week consumables charge instead of £5/week I was expecting. Do you pay consumables for every day they attend? Is this a typical way for nurseries to apply the funding? Can they charge a whole day of consumables when he's getting a quarter of a day funding? I've tried emailing the nursery billing team but haven't had a response.

I'm not annoyed at the nursery - I expected our bill wouldn't drop as much as 1/4, but it's frustrating that the governments lack of funding is causing my bill to go up for something that is being sold as a benefit

Yes that sounds normal.

Re. charging for consumables - Is your child actually present at nursery and receiving 3 meals a day? If so then it’s reasonable to pay for them. However if your child is for example only at nursery till lunchtime but they’re still charging you £2 for the evening meal then that’s not fair.

If they 'specifically' set consumables as separate in pricing then it sounds like the charge is applied every day whether funded or not. Check your contract/their pricing information though.

How are they applying the funded hours if it's spread over the week when it's a daily charge? Is it a % reduction, so 15 hours over 4 days = 3.75 hours a day? Surely it would be easier for them to do 1 funded day then 3 day rate.

My DCs nursery do full or half days until the hours are reached and then day rate for anything after that, no option for spreading and it works well.

DS doesn't eat breakfast there, never has. I didn't mind paying for it for his funded day as £1 a week in the scheme of things isn't worth fussing over. I wasn't expecting it to be every day he attends but I queried this with the nursery a few days ago and haven't had any response.

@ElderMillenials I'll dig out the contract and have a check in there. It does look like they are applying 1/12th of the funded hours to the bill, and applying it a few hours a day but it's not very clear - I'm a statistician and it's as clear as mud to me, I'm not sure how they expect anyone to know what they're being charged. They have got bills wrong before so I do check, but wasn't expecting the actual cost to go up. I was definitely expecting what your nursery do!