We moved our DD to a preschool in September. She’s settled now and doing well. But, we recently moved from tax free childcare to Universal Credit and have just discovered that it doesn’t cover the consumables. Our DS also starts nursery in January and his consumables charge is around £76 per month, which is fine, but DD’s is £411 per month (for 3 days a week).
We’re annoyed because the preschool hadn’t decided their 2025 fees at the time she started because their board hadn’t met, so we were basing it on the previous year’s fees. she’d been there six weeks before we knew how much it was actually going to cost. Significantly more than we expected! I know nurseries are woefully underfunded by the government but am I nuts to think £37 per day is a lot? It’s obviously a top-up fee disguised as a consumables charge because they probably don’t consume quite that much per day. She’s there 3 days a week, and only does one of the peripatetic classes on offer because of that. They close for half terms (and still charge 50% fees) which is another thing that irks me.
We know the charge is voluntary but obviously don’t want our DD to feel like a second class citizen. Would you remove her? She really likes it there and they’re very good with her, but we’re really going to struggle with that charge. We’re not sure what to do really. Sadly we don’t live close enough to a school nursery. We tried but ended up on an endless, unmoving waiting list for one of those.
How did childcare to so broken in this country? 😞