2010 increase to 15 hrs. What is your pre-school doing?

[AnythingsBetterThanTheLastOne]

My nursery, attached to a school, is increasing the 2.5hr sessions to 6 from 5 a week. But I know another nursery/school in the area is increasing their five weekly sessions from 2.5 hrs to 3.

What's the most common way of providing 15hrs per week rather than 12.5?

Our pre-school has been running on a pathfinder project so we've been on 15 hours since January 2009. We started by increasing the session length to three hours, then moved to include a breakfast club and a lunch club (which are both eligible for funding). Parents can also opt to have their child in all day which has proved very popular.

Hi, we were also a pathfinder.

Our school run a three hour morning session and then a session with a one hour lunch club and two hours of nursery. You can mix and match during the week to include full days or choose to just do the day without lunch club (5 hours worth) or include it after the morning session (4 hours worth). You can make it up anyway you like!

We pay for some extra sessions and my daughter does five mornings a week, three lunch clubs and an afternoon session.

Our nursery also provides a differeny afternoon session for children who come only in the afternoon to children who have already been there all morning so they don't get too tired.

The pre-school DS and DD went to is changing times from 9:15 to 11:45 to 8:30 to 1:30 so that parents can have 15 hours over 3 days if they want. I presume they will be able to have three hours a day but not sure quite how they are doing that.

We have morning children and afternoon children. They will all be offered three hours per session, five times a week.

Hi
We are a pathfinder as well and our pre-school operates Tues, Wed, Thurs 9am-2pm. We offer morning sessions of 9am-12pm for the non-funded children

All very interesting. I'm surprised how much variation there is. I had assumed it would be three hour sessions/five times each week all round.

According to the Guidance of my Local Authority, the 15 hours can be taken flexibly over a three day period. I suppose this will be difficult for pre-schools that run 3-hourly sessions??

Day nurseries however should offer the possibility of taking 10 hours in one day and then split the remaining 5 across two further days.

The single funding formula increases the amount pre-schools get paid based on how flexible they are, so it's in their interests to have as many dropping off and picking up times as is practical.

Parents also seem to really like the flexibility. The only downside is we've noticed there's less interaction between parents standing outside to pick up so we're trying to do more social events to get parents talking.

Ours is doing 9-12, 12-3, 3-6 daily. You can also add on 8-9 if you wanted to.