Can I ask about the 15 free hours?

[AndSoFinally]

Child currently attends private nursery for a morning and afternoon session 5 days per week.

Is due to start at the preschool attached to the primary school for 3 hours per day in September. I will still need to take him to the private nursery before work and pick up from there after work so they will be doing the taking to preschool. The taking him there costs an extra £5 per day.

Are the preschool 15 hours my free hours? So I won't save any money and will be paying £5 extra a day when these start? Or is the preschool bit an extra bit and I get 15 hours free from the private nursery in addition? I don't qualify for the 30 hours.

Obviously the private nursery needs to recoup the same costs as they can't take a different child while he's at preschool, but I was just wondering how it worked. We are in Wales if that makes a difference.

Thanks

Pre school is your 15 free hours in England.

Yes the pre school would be his free 15 hours. It might be worth keeping him in his current setting and just claiming the hours there.

If I did that would it affect his chances of getting a place at the primary school for reception? Do children at the preschool come further up the list?

No I don't think attending preschool gets you up the list for school

Are you definitely not entitled to the 30 hours, do you work?
Whether your child attends the school nursery has no influence on their reception place. Most parents can only use the school nursery if they don't work / are on maternity / have good wraparound, it's more hassle than it's worth otherwise.

I can’t for the life of me think why you would do this, there’s really no benefit to using 2 settings if you use childcare already for work.
Using a preschool attached to a school does absolutely nothing to benefit school applications, the process is entirely different.

But yes, you’ll be paying £5 a day to do this as your funded hours will be at the preschool, whereas you could use your 15 hours at the private nursery and spare your child the disruption and stress of a second setting. Mad!

Attendance at a school based preschool does not give any priority for a Reception place in England.

If your DC likes nursery I'd stick with nursery and use the 15 hours there.

I think it's a lot for a 3 year old to wrap their head around attending preschool as well as nursery, especially if you'd drop him at nursery in the morning only for them to taking him to preschool.

I decided to keep DD at nursery because she was happy there. If she hadn't been happy I'd have put her in preschool and paid a nanny to bring her home if I wasn't available at 3pm. I think one childcare setting a day is enough really.

I was going to send him as it's a Welsh language school we want him to attend, but we don't speak Welsh at home and they don't speak it in Nursery so wanted to give him the best chance at picking it up.

I had also thought that it would help your application if you went to the preschool and didn't realise it made no difference. In that case I may just keep him at nursery.

Thanks all

From what you've written you have used up all your free hours with the pre school. We have the same system here. So you need to pay for the nurseries private service

Just saw your update I'm also in Wales. The nursery placement doesn't give any advantage to the reception place

Hi! Sorry to jump on your thread but im finding it so hard to find the answers anywhere and you guys may be able to help.

my two year old has just been granted her 15 hours free childcare. I am a single parent on universal credit, will i still be able to claim 85 percent of childcare costs through universal credit that come after using my 15 hours free?

TIA

@Lauraep87 I believe so. I had 30 hours free childcare and still declared my remaining childcare costs to my Tax Credits account and they upped my payments to cover some of it (don't think it was as high as 85% though).