Free nursery hours for a 3 year old (Scotland)

[caribou82]

Apologies if this has been covered before but I can only find posts relating to free provision in England and Wales.

My son has turned 3 and attends a private nursery for 2 days a week (equivalent to 20 hours if I dropped him off bang on opening an picked him up as they shut the doors!). All the documents are in for his free hours which work out as 16 per week in Scotland during term time. What I don't understand is how this gets worked out. I know I pay as normal and I get a rebate later on but how is this calculated? Do they literally take the costs and refund 4/5ths (16/20)?

The nursery should ask you to fill in a claim form for the council to confirm how many sessions your child has (2 days = 4 sessions). You'll receive a funding code from the council to give to the nursery. Then each term the nursery will issue you with a refund check to cover the council value of the sessions. The council value is likely to be less than private nursery fees - possibly quite significantly.

I should have said that the council covers up to 5 sessions. I've got £8 per session in my mind (less than half what I pay for private nursery) but I'm not sure where I got that from.

We got a approx £10 per session paid by the council. Attending for 2 days would count as 4 sessions so we would have had £40 per week taken off for term time only. Even though he was in for more than 16 hours, he couldn't qualify for 5 sessions unless he was in over a mixture of 5 half days.

I filled out a form in the January before the school year when he would turn 3 then the council paid the nursery directly and my bill from them had the discount applied. I didn't need to get a rebate later.

Thanks. Sounds like it's more straightforward than I thought.