Free nursery hours

[Hannick]

New to this site, this is my first post so hopefully I’m doing it right. My daughter is due to start nursery next September when she’s 3, and like every child, she will be entitled to the 15 free hours and to be honest without these, I wouldn’t be able to afford to send her to nursery at all. The only problem is the nursery I have my daughters name down at only accepts vouchers on Monday and Friday afternoons, however they don’t do half days, so I’m assuming I’d have to send her Monday and Friday and pay for both mornings but get the afternoons free? When really I didn’t want her in for full days at all at first and I did have a brief discussion about this when I first looked round many months ago. Has anyone else found this problem? And is it something that nurseries do now? I understand that some nurseries find it difficult to manage the costs so is this what they do to get round that? If so, it looks like my daughter won’t be starting nursery after all 😞

Are you sure there not offering the 30 hours? Can you find another nursery/pre-school that is more accommodating to your hours. This isn't very flexible.

Look at different places that do offer the free hours at times you want.

Unfortunately I live in area where nursery places get snapped up very quickly and I don’t drive and could walk to this one. Plus her names been down for a while now

There are serious problems with underfunding which risk driving many childcare providers out of business. They do need to find ways to cover rising costs, and even paid-for hours are generally charged at an unsustainably low price.

Put simply, parents now expect free care so nurseries have little choice but to offer it or not attract enough business to stay open. But when they do offer it, it doesn’t bring in enough money to cover their running costs, so they risk a slow financial death. So they have to make up the loss somehow.

BUT from what you describe, this nursery is not doing so within the funding rules. Government rules on funded hours state, "you must not be required to pay any fee as a condition of taking up a 15 hours place, and must be offered alternative options."

That’s not to say they have to offer precisely the hours you want. But they can’t say you can only have the funded afternoons if you take them together with paid-for mornings.

You can clarify this with your local authority's early years funding team,and discuss it with the nursery. Unfortunately it leaves you with something of a moral dilemma. Your ultimate sanction is to tell the manager to make a lawful offer of funded hours within the rules or else you’ll raise a complaint. That will certainly give you a considerable amount of leverage, but the consequences are likely to be anything from a strained relationship with your child’s nursery to one in which they lose/withdraw from the funding scheme, which will have an impact on many families.

Tricky one.

They are just offering the hours when they can afford to. The government give the wonderful free hours message and then don't pay for it. Can you afford to pay for it when they can offer it?