Preschool 15hrs free, how does it work?

[BNmum]

Hi there, my DS currently attends a private nursery for 1 day a week which I hope to up to 2 days a week when he's eligible for his 15hrs free.

The nursery are aware of this, have put his name down for an additional day and said they'll speak to me closer to the time about the finer details. In the meantime, I was wondering if someone could tell me if the free 15hrs are during term-term only?

Yes, they're only during term time. But some nurseries work things in different ways, so make sure that you understand what yours does.

yes term time only although a daycare setting may prorate the monetary effect of this across 12 months' fees rather than discount for 40 weeks and charge the remaining 12 in full, you need to ask them. You also need to ask how they use the 15 hours, some will only allow for a max of 2 sessions of 3 hours per day , so you may not get the full allocation across 2 days.

You can claim your 15 hours over a whole year but to account for the extra weeks, you will get something like 11.something hours per week instead of the 15. But it will be down to how your nursery manages the scheme. I have known some nurseries make it extremely difficult to claim your hours - fingers crossed you don't have one of those!

Withy DD's nursery, they deduct the 'free' hours from the total hours on a termly basis. So in the autumn term, you might be entitled to 15 hours x 12 weeks. They would then divide this allowance by 4 to give a monthly total (sep, Oct, Nov, dec). Then they do the normal invoice and just subtract the hours that are already paid for.

For us, it just means our payments are substantially reduced- we don't really think in terms of the hours because we're already using the childcare.

Thanks ladies, I'll check with the nursery this week and see how it all works. As suspected there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer as they all appear to have their own systems. I appreciate all your replies which have given me food for thought and helped me compose a few questions to ask.

At DD's nursery, the pre-school sessions are 9-12 or 1.30-4.30 and it's only these times, during term time which are funded.

If we wanted to keep DD in for longer than that they would deduct the cost of the funded session (£12.24) from their normal rate.

So an 8-6 day is £48. That would include 2x preschool sessions so they would deduct £24.48 (only in term time of course) and DD would go all year round and pay the full day rate in the holidays.

Or you can of course just do the funded sessions and make other arrangments during holidays.

They do monthly bills and don't pro-rata the funded sessions across the year, but say that during term time some parents might pay a bit extra to build up a credit so that when it's during the holidays they don't feel they get hit so much.