I’m currently in a dispute with little man’s nursery/pre-school about fees. I think I’m being overcharged and their explanation isn’t helping to clarify the situation. I’ll persevere with them but just want to see if someone on here can tell me where I’m going wrong.

Son attends pre-school 1 day per week (9hrs), and they are open 51 weeks of the year. For arguments sake daily cost is £50. Annual cost would be £2550.

As he is 3-4 he is eligible for 15 hours funding. We split this with another pre-school; 6 hours there, and 9 hours at this one. As I understand it, the funding only covers 38 weeks term time.

Therefore in my mind I should be paying for 13 weeks, with the rest being funded, meaning cost over the year would be £650.

Am I wrong?

Sorry this is all a bit mumsnet!

I am in a similar situation. Nursery explanation is that the local authority rate doesn’t cover their hourly rate in full so works out less than the supposed 16hrs per week.

My daughter is in 16hrs per week £360 a month – with the government funding they are knocking £150 a month off…

Nice. At least they are consistent! The explanation given to me so far is…

With our funding as we are a private nursery we don’t run our funding over specific times as we are open full days and we also provide food for the children. Therefore we allocate a certain amount to each child’s account once we have applied for the funding. We spread our funding over 51weeks of the year rather than the 38 weeks of the year. With regards to the monthly bills – these will stay the same for four months and then change. This is due to the “headcount weeks” and how many weeks are in the term to how much funding we get given from the council.

Is a obscure nightmare trying to figure out nursery payments. At our little boy’s, they say the government money is insufficient so things that were included prior to him qualifying for the free hours (food etc) now have to be charged for to try and recoup some of the money they will be missing. They have previously tried to charge us (in their words, “we will give you 50% off”) for they week they were closed over Christmas. They got told to do one for that but understand about them not getting enough from government.

Our nursery simply returned the cash.

In private nurseries, you rarely get the funded hours for free. What you end up with is a discount. So for 9 hours over 38 weeks, the nursery receives a certain amount of money. They are taking that and deducting it from your annual cost and then charging you the rest as a fixed rate through the year.

It is often shockingly badly presented and sometimes made really hard. That is why ours decided to charge the full whack and when a payment from the council arrrived the “overpayment” you had made was refunded with a lump sum. Simple and transparent.

Ours are very flexible but charge for food when using the free hours. They charge during school holidays so no confusion with average hours over the year.

Research showed that only 51% of nurseries in England were expecting to make a profit in 2016, with the average nursery losing an astonishing £957 per child, per year on the 15 hour offer.

BREAKING NEWS: Campaign group reports Government ‘abuse’ of the childcare market to competition authority

What you are missing is the ongoing mismanagement and chronic underfunding of ‘free’ childcare.

We had the same. The 15hours is 15 hours at a specific rate set by your local authority. (£3.40 in our case IIRC but that’s not supposed to be public.)

So the Nurseries use all kinds of workarounds to make it viable for them.

As long as you got a discount of roughly 15x your local authority hourly rate you’re not being ripped off by the Nursery.

It was a real lesson to me in how Central Govt make public promises that make them look good while Local Govt and Nurseries are left to deliver the undeliverable.

Interesting stuff, thanks. I have no issue in paying the fees, more than happy to if its required. It’s just frustrating that there isn’t more transparency from the nursery with their charging.

Nursery I used charged for ‘wrap around care’ – ie the hour over lunch plus food – plus anything outside school hours. Free time only covered morning session and afternoon session. Meaning for it to be useful you had to pay for lunch cover at least, or only have them in 5 mornings or 5 afternoons, and quite short ones at that. I think it’s up to each nursery to decide how to divide the funding up, but they usually find a way to make you pay for something, it’s never really free if you’re using it to actually go to work. On the plus side, it sounds like the way your nursery does it means you can get something free all year long, rather than school terms only – which I guess if that’s the only break you get, will be very welcome. They should be clear in advance how your bills will be worked out though.