Funded places - is anyone else's nursery pulling this crap??!!

[ElusiveMoose]

I'll try to keep this brief. I recently started DS (2.10) in a private nursery-cum-preschool locally. He goes two mornings a week (8-1pm). I chose it because I liked it, but also on the basis that, although it's very expensive for us in the short term (basically £250 a month incl. meals), the cost would go down by well over half in January when the funding kicked in (it runs in the holidays as well, so we knew we would still have to pay for those weeks in full, plus the meal costs).

Anyway, yesterday we got a letter to say that free funding is now only going to be offered during part of each session - ie 8-11am in the mornings and 1-4pm in the afternoons. So, in order to get the full 15 hours of funding, you would have to send your child for 5 sessions per week. In our case, DS will now only qualify for 6 hours of free funding rather than the full 10 hours that he attends, assuming I keep him on 2 mornings a week. In a nutshell, this means that the cost of sending him there after January has just risen by 70%.

I phoned the Early Years Education team at my local authority, and they have told me that the nursery is totally within its rights to do this.

I'm very angry and upset about this. My instinct is to tell them to stick their place up their arse. However, DS has only been there a couple of months, and it was a nightmare getting him settled, and he's now formed a really strong attachment to his key worker, so the thought of taking him out and trying to settle him somewhere else is ghastly (and, I think, unfair on him).

So I'm not sure there's anything I can do except try to find the money to keep him there (I'm not working, and I'm expecting another baby this weekend, so it's not easy). But I was just interested to see if other nurseries were doing the same thing?

I asked a nursery some questions this week and I got a very jumbled set of responses. The gist of it I interpret as follows:

The funding rate is a little over £4 per hour whereas their charges work out at a minimum of £4.50 an hour if you do 12 hours a day or significantly higher if you want to do more than a morning or afternoon session but less than the full 12 hours. At 8 hours attendance for instance, it works out at £6.75 an hour (£54 per day). At 6 hours, it jumps to an effective £9 per hour !

Their explanation of the government "discount" was a little over £200 per month. Now 15 hours at £4 = £60 which I understand it not available for the whole year (are kids supposed to hibernate ?).

But these are businesses and out to make a profit, seemingly a very large profit in many cases. With this funding element, this particular nursery would cost me a net £950 or so a month. I think that is a lot of money, actually costing me more than the minimum wage for adults.

Even for someone claiming full Tax Credits at £140 a week, that would only reduce the net cost to £350 a month. Of course there are probably cheaper places but it seems a very high price to pay, nearly £12,000 a year, to look after a 3 year old baby. Something is most definitely wrong here.