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.

OP, my nursery also charge an extra £2ph for parents using the funded 15-30 hours.

My nusery also does not reduce their rate for 3 year olds even though there is a reduced, child to adult ratio.

I heard the government is cracking down yet my nursery are still charging the extra. I wonder if I should contact my local authority to report them or if its legal?

We pay £61 a day top up fees with 30 hours funding. DD goes 3 says a week and it costs us about £800 a month.

I've considered raising the fact top up fees should be optional. But i know the nursery owner is so bull headed she'd likely just start refusing all funding. We only have a few months until school so sucking it up.

Our nursery charges no extra fees for funded hours, but is only 9-3 term time. We also don't pay for snacks although they are provided by nursery (or local businesses), and all children bring a packed lunch. They fundraise locally within the community for extras that they need, and parents are 'welcomed' to donate weekly/monthly/whenever they like but it is never expected or even directly asked of us. Staff are paid exceptionally well, too. We couldn't afford to donate anything when our eldest child first started there and there was no expectation to but we now donate £50 a month because we can. It's an absolute gem in our community and we're so lucky to have it.

Wow @Essie274 - are they running from a school or community building for which they have to pay little/no rent ?

It was £25 a day for us.

This was meant to cover 3 meals and 2 snacks, and you could only use 10 hours a funding a day but the minimum day length was 10.5 hours so it also covered the extra half hour you had to book.

There's absolutely no way my DD has ever eaten £25 worth of food in a day, but to be honest I didn't mind paying as I could see that they could not have provided what they did for the pittance the govt pay per hour for funded hours.

School preschools tend to be free for funded hours, and you just send a packed lunch, but they are also much less cosy and the ratio is usually lower than a private nursery.

Really, the whole system should be redesigned because it was and is (as often the way!) trying to shoehorn current practice into historic set up. When I was little (40 odd years ago!) I went to nursery, it was on the same site as the infant and junior school, you were either a morning kid or afternoon kid (so 15 hours a week, no lunch I believe), you went for the year or so before you started school and it was actually pre school education.

I don’t know, but I imagine, that things like payroll and the costs of upkeep etc were all managed across the school estate. And of course it was term time only.

But this was rather predicated on there being a SAHM.

So the initial introduction of LA funding for 15h for children in the term after they turn 3, term time only, sprang out of this kind of set up, even though it’s completely illogical for a day care setting running 10 hour days, 51 weeks a year, taking babies and toddlers and preschoolers,

That’s way above what the settings in my county receive.

We receive £7.33 per hour for 2 year olds and £5.37 per hour for 3 and 4 year olds.

This doesn’t look right. If you read the link on the Tops Nusery case law decision. Yours sounds very similar.

https://www.landmarkchambers.co.uk/news-and-cases/the-cost-of-free-childcare-r-on-the-application-of-bournemouth-poole-and-christchurch-council-v-local-government-and-social-care-ombudsman-2025-ewhc-224-admin

This is how it should be working. Government need to extend this model to cover a whole day and holidays for maintained schools. The extra hours around the core school times could be charged for but the profits would go entirely to the school and paying educators wages.

What do you mean? Renting out school sites for holiday camps?

I actually think we need a large scale government project to build new maintained nursery premises that are on, or near infant schools. This should be done via government borrowing as an investment and the buildings would have the benefit of being a tangible asset. These new nurseries could be fitted with solar and other renewable resources to make them as comfortable and as cost effective as possible.
If we are building new homes then as part of the planning process, Section 106 funding could also be obtained through the developers.

The government has already created a degree level early childcare qualification so this fits well into a building programme.
If any profits are made, then they are channelled back into education.

It’s the only solution to an ever growing problem and simply increasing funding every year is too expensive and clearly controversial.
More people i.e. women who have had to give up their careers, would enter the workforce again which would be beneficial to the economy. Well paying and secure jobs would be provided by the new system.

£26 a day on top.
£88 a day with no funding

@BurntBroccoli so state provision of childcare from, what, 9 months old? With some fee payable for hours other than 9-3 and for the school holidays?

My children’s preschool recently charged a consumables fee but didn’t really expand on what it was, but I am guessing something has prompted them because they recently sent out a letter detailing what consumables are. They have stated it’s for things like snacks (£1.50 per child per day) and cookery club.

In addition they charge if parents don’t supply adequate nappies and suncream £1 a nappy, 50p per wipe and £1 for suncream application.

They also charge £5.25 for the lunch hour in the middle of the day, with and additional £2.50 on top if they provide a hot lunch.

My twins get 30 free hours now they are 3, thank goodness but at a rate of £47.25 each per day, plus the other fees on top, I’d have been crippled without the free hours.

Yes.

Fron 1st April they are no longer allowed to charge a ‘lunch fee’ if it introduces an enforced break between funded sessions. It’s fine to charge for the meal itself, but not the lunchtime itself, unless there’s a way of families accessing the 15/30 hours completely free of charge before or after that paid session.

This, but no one ever seems to challenge it. Although I did see a case recently where someone had.

@Littlefish That's interesting, I wasn’t aware of that. I guess that the way my preschool gets around that is that over the course of a 5 day week, the 30 hours are used up by the hours before and after the lunch hour.

although I know not all parents who qualify for the 30 free hours send their children in 5 days a week, yet the lunch hour is explicitly seperated in the fees… so I am not sure how this works for them!

You are not allowed to have an enforced break, breaking up the funded hours.

So unless there’s a way nursery offers funded hours from 1pm to 7pm (6 hours) x 5 days a week, to total 30 hours, they are breaking the rules.

where I am nurseries get just over £11 a funded hour per baby, £8 per funded hour a toddler and £6 a funded hour for 3-4 year olds.
Baby ratio is high so that £11 for 3 babies has to pay a member of staff, cover food, nappies, cleaning, resources.
The 3-4s is a higher kids:staff ratio but you need 3 children to meet minimum wage for one member of staff, 4 to meet that and make the new ni contributions for them, 5 -6 to be able to do the pension bit - this is before food, toys, suncream, cleaning etc etc (we lose £1 an hour for every 3 year old against our fees, that's a big loss)
Childcarers will never get more than minimum wage but parents want a lot for their funding because it was sold to them as 'free' and it's nurseries that are subsidising it. Is it a right to have free childcare? It is totally a right to have high quality child care and food but maybe not for free because someone somewhere has to pay and meanwhile the staff are never going to get off minimum wage

An excellent post. Describes exactly how it is and tbf has been this way since funding was introduced. Also, don’t forget ‘free’ funding only applies to school weeks and nurseries often stretch this to cover all weeks.

My daughter is at a childminders. I pay no top up fee at all. I pay for thr hours I use over the 15 hours and is about £300 a month. Thr hourly rate is about 6 pounds. I’m a teacher so don’t need to worry about stretching thr hours over the holidays which makes a difference. Im term time only

I don’t mind paying a little extra for cooked meals and nappies. I don’t want the nursery to close.

My son goes to nursery twice a week, 7:30 - 6 (there’s only the option for a half day or a full day). He gets 30 funded hours, but the nursery only accepts them for 7.6 hours per full day, so we have to pay £22.25 a day on top, and we’re not even using all of the funded hours!

This is a Busy Bees nursery, which is, unfortunately, the best of a very bad bunch of nurseries near us, so we are stuck.

My son’s nursery is £93 per day usually. If you have funded hours there’s a top up fee of £7 for under 3s, and something like £28 for 3/4 year olds (presumably because the funding rates are so much lower). Should I be able to access the hours for free? Yes, probably. Is £28 for 10 hours childcare, 2 meals and 2 snacks a bargain? Also yes. Plus most (all?) people eligible for the hours also qualify for TFC reducing the price further. We got no funded hours for our older daughter until she was 3 so im
not complaining!