The NCT are having a laugh aren't they???!!!!

[lubella]

I just applied for Ante Natal classes and the literature came thorough at £180 for a 2 day intensive course.

Before I sign up to these can someone out there honestly justify to me that they are worth it; I'm sure it said £100 on the leaflet I recieved as a member and I just feel like WTF??(&&&&!!?

"The NCT SHOULD be funded from those members who can afford it..." Er... but they are!

it also, to me, seems a bit like going private, tbh.

agree with mp again. I dunno, the NHS is consistently providing superior services to the NCT round here.

It doesn't do a newsletter with birth stories, but it does pretty much everything else.

I wouldn't do it as it's a lot of money, personally. Unless you told them you couldn't afford it and see what they said.

Having said that, I joined the NCT, and joined dh too, when having ds. I was 21 (or 22? Can't remember lol) had just moved to a new (country type) area. The class was full of mid to late 30s mums, all breast feeding, all had decided to be SAHMs, who owned their own houses and drank coffee.

I, on the other hand, was 21, bottle feeding (although not through choice), going back to work, renting our house, and I drink diet pepsi Needless to say they thought I was an alien species. I tried just to join in but it was pointless.

If you think you can get something out of it... maybe it would be worth it. I didn't.

i love my NCT pals and i don't grudge the money (but i also could afford to pay it, which seems to me crucial), but i do agree with morningpaper that i found the anti-NHS stance quite shocking.

i was 'lucky' in that i had high blood pressure throughout my pregnancy so i knew that i already rather loved my doctor and i felt that i had to be open-minded about the birth scenario and just hope for everyone to be safe and well at the end of it.

had i not, however, been seen at the hospital throughout my pregnancy and been utterly convinced that i was receiving excellent medical care i believe i would have been quite frightened by some of the things the NCT teacher was saying.

she kept on telling us that the first thing we should do on entering the birthing suite was to drag the mattress onto the ground and refuse to ever get up on a bed. Who knows, i might do this if i have a second child but i feel that the 'treat the NHS systems with antagonism, they are bean-counters and don't care about your birth' would actually have been quite frightening with a first if i hadn't already known my NHS carers.

(Because the NHS staff i met really did care, i felt, to the tips of their toes and back, that i had the absolute best birth i could have and that i was as safe as could be).

As it was, of course, the NCT teacher was so barking that it made our group (men and women) bond all the more, so perhaps that was her plan anyway?

Incidentally I spoke to the co-ordinator and she said there was no discount available to me as I was married and we both worked, what she was prepared to do was split my payment over a few weeks which is helpful I suppose, she seemed a bit surprised when I asked about the age group of the class but mentioned I may be at the younger end being 29, however my DH is 50...so maybe that will balance things out!
I have read what has been said on this thread with great interest and have decided to go ahead as most experiences have been positive.
I am defo not the 4x4 driving type head to toe in Designer and a Banker husband (don't get me started) if the classes are like thatI/we will be gutted but I will take my chances. Still think the prices take the piss big time but am willing to do it anyway.

bad luck Lubella!

I think most branches qould consider that if you are both working you should pay full price

which seems very wrong to me

I attended NCT ante-natal classes when pg with my dd2, 10 years ago, as I was an older mother and had previously given birth a couple of decades earlier. My particular group was tiny, only 4 couples (but 2 of the dh's didn't attend as they didn't want to "get involved in that side of things"
My dh (actually dp then) and myself found the classes quite informative in terms of what you are "allowed" to do in labour nowadays (my first was highly medicalised). Consequently we did feel a sense of empowerment during the birth.
However the other 3 couples were having their first and did tend to swallow hook line and sinker the NCT natural birth line and all ended up with experiences that were nothing like they thought they would be.
The best thing for me was that I immediately joined the NCT Bumps and Babies Group which I ended up co-ordinating for 2 years and still have great friends for myself and dd from. You did need a car though as our area was geographically huge. Prices? Were reasonable but definitely not affordable for everyone, although I seem to remember that you could pay a token amount like £1 if you were on benefits. Socially, however, I think the NCT is pretty self-regulating (middle class)and I found some of the women at NCT social events to be definitely a type.
As for the NCT magazine that came with membership, it was so political that I thought of it as akin to the Socialist Worker in the sense of being virtually unreadable.

The NCT seems to vary hugely from Branch to Branch. I did the (not too bad) NHS course and balked at the price for NCT, but they were fully booked anyway... However, my local branch is very very pro natural birth and I ended up with a c/s. I think it might acually have been counter productive for me. I ended up getting to know a few members anyway locally and I'm not particularly shy about getting to know people. I still go to NCT events, but in an 'arms length' kind of fashion (mine are way too hippy: natural birth and extended breastfeeding etc for my likings).

hhhhmmm, lubella... that's not very impressive. on our forms it said something to the effect that the nct was a charity and as such cost should not be a barrier to attendance and that anyone wishing to ask for a discount should do so and would be treated with the utmost respect and discretion.

aitch I bet if you rang your local branch and said you were both working but couldn't really afford the fee, you would get the same response

I bet you a muffin

lubella - I did a brief write up of our NCT classes last year in this thread , might be worth a skim.

Interesting thread; I did NCT and NHS first time around, and have about the same amount of friends from both - but overall, apart from the comfy chairs and home-made soup, which was lovely, they were very very similar in terms of content.
NCT was a tiny group (six, and three have moved away) so if you didn't have much in common with the others, you were stuck. NHS was about 20, so you had to work harder to get to know people but lots more choice and variety.
Teachers at both were v. nice, and neither pushed natural childbirth over any other kind - both gave info on c-sections (and half the NCT group ended up with them, not elective).

I suppose like any national organization, there is going to be a lot of variation from area to area, and from teacher to teacher - and even from group to group, depending on the personalities within them. It was ok, but I'm not in need of a ton of new support-pals this time so am just doing NHS...will miss the soup and cake though...

Oh, and re the OP.....yes, it IS expensive. I can afford it, but was still taken aback and wondered how exclusive it might be as a result of cost.

And, hi Lubella

Hmm, some interesting points here. I am a class-coordinator in a busy urban area. I'm sure 99% of the people who take my classes are middle-class. If someone asks for a discount I don't ask about their marital status or employment status, I offer a discount. I don't want to have an embarassing conversation with them!

Our classes have always been accessible by public transit. But then, I don't drive, so I like things to be accessible that way. And again, urban centre.

Re: some teachers not being good. That's tricky. As a class co-ordinator, frankly, I'll take what teachers I can get. The demand is so much higher than I can fulfill ... I've got a new teacher teaching her first class for us next weekend, and thankfully my predecessor (previous class co-ordinator) is attending the class as a pregnant person, so I'm sure I'll get detailed feedback.

Hi Eli hope all is well, I will budget for this and hope for the best - will update y'all on my experience...
betcha can't wait!

Not Quite can I ask how much your classes cost?

oh and thanks Hub2 I am reading your link now x

£140 for the two-day, £100 for the (somewhat unorthodox) one-day. Includes a bf class. No membership included.

We could charge less, as we currently have our venue free of charge. We probably will charge less, or just fail to raise prices, until things start getting tight again.

If anyone mentions wanting a discount or having problems paying, I immediately offer a half-price course. This has always been accepted. (Of course, most of the time I don't have a place, but people wanting discounted places are given the same priority as anyone else.)

Sue W thank-you but will that get me in awful trouble with my co-ordinator?

Yes we both work but don't really want to go into all the reasons why this is difficult for us online, I will have to go without certain things to make way fotr this course. Bacically in the NCT booklet it said £100 which I put aside - the I got the literature through and it was £180 with membership.
She said that the fees had gone up since I read the booklet (Sept!) as they had a new financial year and she also said my branch was the cheapest or something, then asked me if I was a single parent and if my husband and I worked - (not particularlly pleasant TBH)

"a branch might be doing work with local asylum seekers/teenagers which is funded by the 'profit' from their 'regular' classes"

oh come on

If they were even THINKING about this they could access shedloads of money

And i'd applaud them as well

But I'm sure 99% of branches just busy themselves with the apronned classes

"a branch might be doing work with local asylum seekers/teenagers which is funded by the 'profit' from their 'regular' classes. "

are any branches seriously doing this? Am really, genuinely asking. It will bump the nct up about 100 times in my estimation if so.

My local branch charges £200 as well - which made me blink a bit - but I just supposed that it's my choice, as I live a 10 minute bus ride away from Kings College Hospital and could take advantage of their free classes if I want to.

Do they really give you cake? Fantastic.

We went to NCT but it was one evening a week for can't remember how many weeks. I found it very helpful as I had never really intended to have kids and had therefore kept away from conversations etc about babies, kids, pg etc all my life and knew absolutely nothing about what to expect; I was so ignorant I didn't know what questions to ask!

Re the support group thing, didn't work for me, didn't find anyone there I was interested in knowing after or swapping baby stories about poo with. Had 2 reunions after we'd all produced and really found them an incredible waste of time.

BTW the 'teacher'(?) we had at nct did actually spend quite a lot of time with very young single mums...

Also they had a breast-feeding person who did help me a bit after dd was born and I couldn't feed her BUT I had to put her onto bottles at 9days (she weighed less than when she was born by then), so it didn't actually work, but it did make me feel better whle I was still trying, fwiw.