CALLING ALL PARENTS WITH PRE-SCHOOLERS

[flashharriet]

The Govt. apparently intends to increase the number of funded hours for 3 and 4 year olds from 12.5 to 15 per week from September. It will also ensure that these 15 hours are "free at the point of delivery" i.e. the provider will not be able to charge any top-up.

If your child currently does less than 15 hrs pw in total, will you increase them?

And if not, why not?

TIA

(Am involved in a pre-school and we're just trying to get our head round this)

DD1 attends preschool in a pilot area. She uses 14 of the 15 hours. At her preschool drop off is either 09.00 or 09.30, pick up either 12.00 or 12.30 (lunch is at 12.00), except Tuesdays, where there is a 09.00 or 09.30, or 12.00 or 12.30 drop off, and a 12.00, 12.30, 2.30 or 3.00 pick up.

We changed to 15 hours a week last September. My pre-school does 9:15 - 12:15 and also a lunch club 12:15 - 13:15 which you can pay extra for or use it in your 15 hours.
So my son goes three days a week 9:15 - 13:15 and one day 9:15 - 12:15 and still has one day home with me. I love the flexibility to be honest.

Our pre school currently offers 2.5 hour sessions - they will just offer an extra session per week rather than loosing the revenue from lunch club that they currently charge for

PuppyMonkey - my ds is also 3 on the 6th April, so i too have to wait until September . When i voiced an opinion on another thread that i think it is unfair to have to wait so long i was told not to be so childish!! Cant see what was wrong with my opinion actually!!

It's not childish to want to save money on your childcare is it 2boys? DD has chums a week older than her that will get the funding from April. They'll get a whole five months or so more than she will. I don't care if people think I am childish, I'm cross about that. Why can't the funding just start as soon as they turn three?

Would love to see a link to that thread.

Thanks everyone, this has been really helpful. Perversely, I think this will actually make our pre-school less flexible as we will have to prioritise those parents who want the most sessions to be able to break even .

I had the same when dd1 turned 3 as she has an April birthday, it's v annoying.

Yes DD already does the 15 hours - 25% of lancashire is piloting the scheme and her nursery is one of them.

She used to do 2 full days - 9-6 (when I work). Since september she now does 21/2 days - friday am to use the 3 extra 'free' hours.

Nursery told me I couldn't have 15 hours over 2 days even though she is there enough hours. So now I have a nice friday am to go to the dr, hairdresser etc

I can understand the frustration if your child has an early April birthday.

I think we're all mature enough to understand that in order to make the funding system in any way manageable for preschools (many of which are run by volunteer committee members)there has to be cut off dates.

However, a lot of confusion stems from the terminology we use. So many sources of information state that a child is eligible for funding from 'the term following their 3rd birthday'. (I'm guilty of quoting this to parents myself). So if your child turns 3 in early April, during the Easter holidays, you quite reasonably assume they are eligible for funding from the start of the summer term. Only then you find that actually they had to turn 3 by 31 March to qualify, which isn't the same thing.

I would like to see funding cut off dates being set on a half termly basis - it would help parents out, and would be much better for preschools because often we have places lying empty for much of a term because the parent can't afford to send the child until they get their funding.

MHB I agree with you about funding half termly. I think it would avoid a lot of confusion - especially in our county where we are now working on a six-term year, but funding isn't. How much more work it would involve, I'm not sure (one of the things I don't do is funding!), but I do think it would be sensible to step in line.

We have had a bit of a discussion about the 15 hour increase over the last few months, and have decided (for the present, although that may change when we've finished our review of admissions) that we will just increase to six sessions from the current five.

We just don't see how we can be flexible. We are a small rural pre-school with two sessions per day and a lunch club for over 3s. The morning session is from 9.15pm to 11.45 and the afternoon is from 12.30 to 3pm. We are in our own building, but it has very little flexibility for adding extra hours within the day. It's something I'll be looking at with our admissions review.

Sorry, didn't answer OP!

DS1 will be leaving in the summer, but DS2 will be starting in September, but only with two sessions which we will have to fund (for two terms).

I reckon that by the following September, I will take up probably five of the six sessions and then after Christmas he'll do six sessions - probably two whole days and two half days, but quite a lot of it'll depend on the review I'm doing!

We're running on the 15 hours now too and have had very positive feedback from parents. We have two three hour "sessions" per day between 9.00-12.00 and 12.30-3.30 plus a bfast club and lunch club.

Most children stay for either bfast club or lunch club and we have quite a few who stay all day between 8.30am and 3.30pm.

It takes a little while to get parents to forget "sessions" and work in hours instead.

One downside of all this flexibility is we've noticed a downturn in the interaction between parents at pick up times. We're planning more social events to try to get parents talking again.

we get 16 hours, in lancaster and nottingham

Ds currently gets 12.5
I would HAPPILY increase it to as many as they can give me as he is high maintainance an active little soul.