Preschool allocations (in Edinburgh)

[Loolumboolum]

Hello all... bit of a lurker emerging here as I'm stuck.

I have a 3 year old DS and a 7 month old DS. I am already sort of back to work. DS1 attends a private day nursery 2 full days a week, and the fabulous plan was that DS2 would do the same, thus leaving me to work 2 full days and have my mum help out with the remainder (I'm contracted 25 hours).

Bearing in mind all of this, I declined the preschool place that was offered to DS1 thinking that I'd use the funding against the private nursery.

Problem: having done the maths, the private nursery for both DS seems untenable (shock I know).

So my question: can I re-accept a place that I have declined? Can I get back on the list? Failing that, does anyone have any miraculous ideas or tips on nannies?

Thank you for reading this far I'm in a total panic! ...

Hi. Not sure if you are still strugging with this but didn't want to leave you unanswered. My experience would be that if you decline a place you'd go to the bottom of the list again, but that depending on uptake a place might become available. Presumably you only got offered a morning or afternoon place for DS1 and your mum would be doing the 'wrap-around' for those sessions, otherwise it would actually mean paying for this too in addition to the pre-school nursery. I would contact the school and explain your sitation - they can be quite sympathetic if you approach them nicely. Also, I'm not sure what Edinburgh does, but in East Lothian if your DS was attending 4 sessions of private nursery, you'd get 4 sessions funding (as you can get up to 5) which wouldn't leave so much to pay for his full 2 days, although I appreciate this might still be too much.

Thank you so much. Am going to contact the school, and have also hired an au pair and cancelled the nursery. The joys....