How much do you pay in top up fees at nursery?

[DAngela]

DS is now getting “15hrs a week” funding, which on the invoice seems to equate to 8hrs and 11 minutes, and then there’s a consumables fee on top of £2 an hour which is charged for the entirety of any funded or part-funded days.

Nursery costs £70 a day for 10hrs, so effectively the funding is saving us £50 a week.

Is this pretty standard? I was hoping for a bit more of a saving.

Well they aren't allowed to charge top up fees, only for extras that you can opt out of such as food,.

£20 a day on top of funding for DN's nursery

We can’t opt out of it and no outside food is allowed on the premises. Technically the charge is for food but also stuff like art materials and trips (they don’t actually go on trips).

Same as for us then. I must say I thought she’d actually get a free day a week out of the 15hrs… But actually it works out to about equivalent to 2/3 of a day off per week.

Well as i said, they aren't allowed to do that. I'm a childminder, if I have to stick to the rules so should nurseries.

We pay 700 a month for 3 days 8-4 with 15 hour funding.

Apparently our fund hours are available 2 hours a day or something. So it saves a couple of hundred or so over the month but not much.

Well I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be acting illegally, it’s an established nursery in a chain.

I’ve just checked and they do offer “very limited” funding only places without the charge, but only on a Friday and you can’t use that and pay for other days. So realistically very few parents are going to access it.

We don't pay any top up fees, as a PP said they technically are not allowed to charge a fee that you can't get out of by, for example, sending your own food

We pay for food, but we could decide not to and send in food instead, and that charge would disappear from our bill.

We pay £164 a week for three days a week including food, with the 15 hours funding spread across 52 weeks of the year so that only ends up covering about a day. We're in the SE.

Well I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be acting illegally, it’s an established nursery in a chain.

Loads of nurseries do this, it is against the funding rules, and Labour have recently said they want this properly enforced (although of course if the funded hours were funded properly, fewer nurseries would feel the need to claw back some of their fees this way).

The chain nurseries are the worst for it.

You can choose not to believe me, I don't care. But at least have a Google and check.

I guess they circumvent the rules by offering those very limited places on a Friday (DS and a few other babies don’t attend on Fridays so it’s their quiet day).

Would be interesting to see if Labour enforces it, though I guess they’d just put the charges up to cover it anyway.

It’s not that I don’t believe you, just that my nursery doesn’t offer it in a way we can access. If I refused to pay the charge, we’d be asked to leave. They have a waiting list.

Well that's how they are getting away with it.

From April they need to itemise invoices, say what exactly the charge is for (rather than a generic 'Consumables') and make it clear it is voluntary, giving the option of providing yourself if you don't want to pay. From January 2026 the information must be clearly given on their website.

They’ve just generated invoices for the summer term running til September, and it’s called “Additional Service Charge” rather than Consumables now, so I don’t think they’re planning to make any imminent changes.

As I said they’ll probably just put the daily charges up instead if they can’t charge the top-up, so I don’t know if that’d work out worse for me.

I’m guessing they have to, by law, offer at least some funding only places, but there’s no regulation on how many of them? That’d explain why they have a couple of funding only slots on the Fridays.

Opt out off food? Do you not want your child to eat at nursery? Alot off nurseries won't allow you to send in food due to allergy

As I said, the rules have changed. You have to be given the choice to provide now.

Our top up fees are £1.50 an hour, so about £15 a day for us (we get the 15 hours, which is one day a week when spread over the whole year).

Technically it's illegal but most nurseries do it. The fact so many parents accept it means they get away with it.

The government just updated the guidance on fees as it's a big and well known problem so hopefully things will start to improve.

Childcare is low pay yes but the nurseries who charge are being run as a business where profit is more important than the children's care and education. I find it infuriating. I'm a childminder myself and hate how even the LA early years team give advice on how to word policies etc so you can charge a top up fee and not get in trouble for it. They say things like "you are running a business" etc etc. Their role is to ensure quality early education for all children but most meeting i go to the focus is on making money, avoiding having Sen as they hard work for the money and blaming parents for everything. I've been in childcare 20+ years and when I started it was so very very different

I don’t really understand the narrative of nurseries struggling. Ours had stakeholder funds of 2.5m last year.

Well because some (most?) genuinely are. But some, usually the big chains, aren't. It's that simple.

This isn’t a big chain, there’s only two nurseries.

And their fees seem pretty standard for nurseries in the area.

DS is 3, gets 15 hours which gets him 2 full days a week. I pay £20 a month for his snacks, they get two snacks a day, we send a packed lunch. Awesome nursery in North lincs.

Wow, that’s incredible.

DS is in four days a week with 15hrs funding, gets under one day free, and it costs between 800 and 1100 a month. West Midlands.

There is no way that two nurseries have a shareholder fund of 2.5m. Just no way.