Committee Members - anyone else been asked to increase to 15 hours funded?

[Orinoco]

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Have you informed Ofsted & your insurers that you are caring for children for over 4 hours? We can't do full day sessions at our pre-school because we don't have a separate 'rest area'.

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We will have to re register in September 2008 because of new premises, we were told last week that a condition of our re registration will be offering 3 hour sessions.

Don't think our pre-school could manage it as our kids either do mornings or afternoons, no mixtures. We also don't have any kind of food prep or rest area.

I heard almost 2 years ago that Government wanted as of April 2006 to increase to 3 hours as the basic session length everywhere, sounds like they are slowly phasing it in.

Spoke to a childcare business adviser today who said unless you are in a pilot area they are not expecting this until 2010.

we decided to notgo for the pilot scheme as we would have to go to the monthly meetings and it stated that if you didn't attend you would have to pay back the funding
We'll wait until all the teething problems are ironed out.

Is the 3 hour session to be funded at the same rate as the current 2.5 hour sessions?

If so, that seems unworkable and unfair.

At our playgroup we can only offer 5 sessions a week because the hall is used by other church groups the rest of the time. We do offer lunchtime sessions on 2 days a week, effectively bridging the gap and offering parents a 'school day' of 5.75 hours. So we have a 2.5 hour session, followed by 45 minutes lunch, followed by a second 2.5 hour session.

However we have to charge for this 45 minute lunchtime slot because of our increased costs - staff now have to each have a half-hour paid lunch break, which they never had before when we were sessional. We also have to pay an extra person to cover 2 hours twice a week because our 4 members of staff take their staggered breaks, so for 2 hours each day we're one person short.

The 'rest area' bit isn't a huge problem - we basically have a very small corner where we have lots of comfy cushions/beanbags, and that counts as a rest area.

I did wonder about this when I saw the Budget news about 15 hours a week of pre-school education.

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