You might lose your free hours for your 3/4 year old

[merryberry]

The Early Years Funding Single Formula for 'free' 3 and 4 year old childcare is supposed to be rolling out across England next month.
A statutory increase from 12.5 to 15 hours of free childcare is supposed to be on offer.

However, you may find like me that your nursery or pre-school or childminder says they cannot operate under the new code for one simple reason - they are not supposed to charge top up fees and that in fact your early years free childcare is now vanishing. They are supposed to offer completely free places only. Given that the funding is for under £4 an hour, you can see what is going to happen in other settings like my DS2's.

Either you pay full cost, you find/set up cheaper childcare provision yourself or you withdraw your child and get back into the home. I am spitting teeth over this.

Personally, I'd rather it was just bloody cut with a decent notice period to it so I could plan for it. Not warned in Mid-Feb by DS2's place that they 'think but not sure that we will have to withdraw from the scheme from April, but the LA doesn't know what's going on but the figures dictate that if the code is implemented as written, they will go bust within 17 weeks'.

As childcare providers around the country have found, each local authority is taking different approaches to various issues, like interpreting 'when is a top up charge not a top up charge' to try and keep places open and parents in work. It's a mess and it seems there is actually going to be a review of this over the next few weeks.

Please add yourself to this petition to add information and weight to the call for a rethink on this.

Please forgive me cross-posting, I'm popping this in the relevant pre-school topic areas.

Camdancer: see what you mean. Sounds weird, as the only possible remaining difference is if the community one is in eg Church premises, as they have some rates exemptions and buildings maintenance covered. If that doesn't apply, I can't imagine what they could be fairly basing it on.

camdancer: yes it is a disgrace. that's what it's like in Herts. I didnt know it was more realistic in other counties so that's good, but we all need to realise what's going on in other areas I guess.

£2.88? That's shocking. We're on £4.20 - but £8 seems a little steep IMO.

Formula is all listed online (see link below) for 2010-11 - as I said in a previous post we don't know yet what we get for 2011-2012 until mid-end March.

HantsWebsite

As I said before we had to change radically to make sure we got the maximum funding, Hants does it on number of drop off times and number of pick ups, so we went for the most that made sense - we have a timetable as follows:

8.30 - 9.00 Breakfast Club
9.00 - 12.00 Morning session (with optional 9.30 drop off)
12.00 - 12.30 Lunch club
12.30 - 3.30 Afternoon session (with optional 3.00 pick up)

This way we can offer 5 drop off points a day (8.30, 9.00, 9.30, 12.00 and 12.30) and four pick ups (12.00, 12.30, 3.00 and 3.30). Parents love the flexibility, and will usually add hours on top of the funded hours. We do not and have not charged top ups at least since I've been there (3 years). We do have a thriving fundraising team which helps and the GLF funding has been a godsend.

sofus - £8.00 per hour barely covers the rent. Things are very different outside your area.

We are in this for the kids and not to make a massive profit by the way - just to make that clear.

In fact, ANY profit at all would be a luxury. As i said before, we hardly have a viable business now because of the EYSFF code of practice, and are seriously thinking we may need to shut down, to the detriment of children AND staff.

We are in Northants - it's £3.52(2.82 plus 0.70 premises supplement which all PVIs get) for the basic SLFF.
Supplements are
£0.10 per hr if Ofsted outstanding
£0.20 per hr if led by a graduate and 50% of staff L3 or £0.40 per if led by graduate with EYPS and 75% of staff level 3.
There are also deprivation supplments which give eligible settings additional funding for employing a second graduate or a lump sum for having an appropriate action plan. The amount depends on the no of hrs per week the setting is open - over 30 is £23000 for a second graduate or £12,700 for the action plan.

We are on the bottom rate (£3.52 per hour). We now own our own building leasehold paying ground rent of £2250 per year. We charge £3.33 per hr to 2 year olds.

Our village pre-school is a non profit parents committee run pre-school.
We are ofsted outstanding, have a graduate supervisor, 3 level 3's, 1 level one and a volunteer working towards level 1. All staff and volunteer are working towards next stage qualifications paid for by pre-school (I imagine we get grants for the vast amount of this training). We run out of the village hall so we pay rent but don't have upkeep responsibility. There are between 12 and 20 children in a session. Children can start from the age of 2 years 9 months. We are open Monday mornings for 2.5 hour session and then Wednesdays through to Thursday we are open 9am to 3pm and can offer mornings or afternoons (2.5 hours) or you can add in an extra half hour to make a 3 hour morning session or an extra hour and have lunch and you can also have a full day. (right now ds does Monday, Wednesday morning with lunch hour and Thursday till 11.30, when his funding kicks in after Easter he will do full days both Wednesday and Thursday as well as Monday mornings so I will be using 14.5 hours).

Before the funding went from 12.5 hours to 15 hours if your child did a full day you had to pay for the hour lunch between the two funded sessions, they have never charged top up fees as this has never been allowed as far as I am aware. (when my dd was there, she started school Sep 09, one lunch session cost me about £55 per term).

Going by my fees while I am paying this term the per hour cost is approximately £3.80. Our pre-school is doing well, they seem to manage to provide the fantastic service they provide for this hourly charge (they don't have food costs as parents are on a rota to provide morning snack, we are asked to do this once a term), we do allot of fund raising but this is never used for paying staff, training, overheads or administration, it is solely used for new equipment, special one off classes (salsa dance for example) and trips. Before the new rules on funding came in they used to charge a £15 regestration fee when you put your childs name down but this was largely used to stop people putting names down when they had no real intention to use or if they were unlikely to get a place (this would be explained to people, we are over subscribed, we offer children within the catchment for the village primary priority for places so if someone in the nearest town was to put their name down they would be unlikely to get a place) but they are no longer allowed to do this as it needs to be completely free and not exclude people who couldn't pay the registration fee. They also had to increase flexibility, in the past you couldn't do an afternoon session if you didn't do it as part of a full day but that has now changed (although staff say the couple of children who do afternoons don't really settle on those days).

I guess what I am trying to say is that it is possible to offer high quality provision within the budget of funded places however it only works (I think) if you are not running it as a business, there is no profit to be had from funded places, also if you own the building you use the cost of upkeep could be detrimental to affording to provide high quality provision.

Sorry for the long post but wanted to point out you can have high quality pre-school provision while providing funded places, the vast majority of children at our pre-school are on funded places (right now only 4 children are not funded out of about 35 on roll) but providing this provision is dependent on many factors that many providers are unable to achieve.

It sounds lovely roadkill! you are lucky. I can see this model would be very hard to make work in London, with the general rents and costs of labour when needed for maintenance etc.

Can someone please explain this to me in very simple terms - I can't follow it. My son is at FT nursery. We used to get say £60 I think off a months fees. The nursey is now no longer taking part in scheme as of September. Why? If someone can explain this in easy enough terms for me to understand I can work out if we should be splitting his care between 2 providers maybe? How is anyone going to be able to benefit from this scheme now? Thanks

They are no longer in the scheme because they don't get enough money to cover costs. Each council has massively complicated formula's to work out how much each provider gets, but once it is set, they provider can't do anything about it. That's just how much they get for each child - regardless of their costs. They aren't allowed the ask the parents to pay the shortfall for those 15 hours, so either they make a loss on those hours or pull out of the scheme.

You can take your 15 hours anywhere that is still involved in the scheme. So splitting care over 2 providers is definitely allowed. Whether it is sensible or workable is up to you.

"How is anyone going to be able to benefit from this scheme now?" That's the question everyone is asking. If you find a setting that can make it work for whatever reason then great (low rents, low staffing costs, make parents pay lots for other hours). Otherwise you have to pay.

The nursery school my little boy is going to attend in September has pulled out of this. I think the policy is terrible as it is going to create a two tier system

Does anyone know what the situation is for funding in Hertfordshire. My son is entitled to 15 hours now (April term). Do you know how you claim the funding? He will be going to a nursery 3 days a week from 1 April (5hrs, 5hrs and 10hrs) so should be entitled to 15 hours. Worried because the nursery hasn't been explicit that they will be claiming the funding.

I would ask them directly to see what they are going to do. It varies nursery to nursery