What does minimum mean to you?

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https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/106123 



Last month I queried my nursery bill because the Early Years funding seemed like such a spit in the ocean.

The nursery showed me a table provided by the Council which told them how much to knock off my bill.

I contacted Newport City Council, who within a day got back to me with a helpful response confirming that each child receives £6.83 for each session attended.

Unfortunately however, this amount does not cover the actual cost.

So I contacted Huw Lewis, Minister for Education to ask whether he was aware of this short all and to raise awareness of the big difference in Early Year funding between England and Wales.

Almost one month later I received an email from someone working in Foundation Phase Policy. The points made were fair, in that she mentioned that Wales and England vary in lots of ways, and that there was additional funding where it was felt it was needed. However she did also confirm and I quote;

In Wales, all 3 and 4 year-old children are entitled to funded early education for a minimum of 10 hours per week over a minimum of 38 weeks in the year – a minimum of 380 hours. 

And this is my key point - due to the shortfall between the funding and actual cost, we are not actually receiving the minimum number of funded hours.

The government is providing funding at a rate of  around £30 a day, when our nursery (and all others in the area) charge £37.50

I replied to the response I received, but 8 days on I have had no response.

I wanted to raise awareness of this shortfall, but it seems Huw Lewis never even saw my email sent to his official email address. I tweeted him twice but was disappointed to get no response.

I also tweeted my AM, Rosemary Butler, to ask whether there was any other path I could take, but again got no response.

So maybe I'll jump down off my soapbox and do something more useful with my time.

Sign the petition...it probably won't change anything but at least it will have been considered again
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/106123 

Free Childcare in England vs Wales (England wins again)

"All 3 and 4-year-olds in England are entitled to 570 hours of free early education or childcare a year. This is often taken as 15 hours each week for 38 weeks of the year." [gov.uk]


In Wales however, the Wales.gov.uk equivalent page reads:

Sorry, the page you are looking for cannot be found. [Wales.gov.uk - as linked from above .gov.uk website]

It cannot not be found by searching the website for Early Years, or Rising 3s.

This doesn't surprise me at all, as the early year/ rising 3 funding in Wales is a challenge to understand.

As I understand it, it must have an education element, it cannot simply be free childcare, so my daughter had to move nursery to qualify.

Each child is entitled to attend up to 5 morning or afternoon sessions per week. These must be taken on separate days.

Each session is between 2 and 2.5 hours per day.

This is term time only.

Ok, so that makes sense, yes it does.

In my case, Miss Megan attends nursery all day, but her pre school session runs from 12:30 to 2:45 each day - 2 hours 15 per day

Given we have 39 weeks of education per year, I would expect her to receive just short of 439 hours of free childcare per year.

Already this puts Wales 131 hours of freeness down on England (or to put it another way, parents in Wales are £485 worse off than those in England)

But then when you query your nursery bill, it turns out the situation is slightly different to what it advertised.

Hours don't come it to it at all in Wales - each child receives £6.83 per session attended.

So off a monthly bill of £801, you get £111

Now let's put that back into hours - it's £1332 per year, doesn't sound bad initially, but in reality it doesn't cover the cost of the FREE sessions

Nursery is open 8am to 6pm (10 hours) and costs £37 per day, so £3.70

£1332, divided by £3.70 is actually only 360, meaning instead of the 439 hours I was expecting to receive, we actually only get 360 hours free per year - losing me another 80 hours on if we'd stayed living and working in England.

In reality we are 210 hours worse off per year than if we lived across the border. This is also known as £777

Put simply the government gives us 67p less per hour than we pay for the FREE sessions.

Therefore it costs  parents £130 for their child to attend the free sessions.

You might argue that our nursery is more expensive than average - but this is not true, in fact the nursery we moved from was more expensive again, and there is definitely no nursery in the area that charges less.

Potentially of course your child doesn't have to attend all day, they could just come for the free session and leave at the end.

While I was on maternity leave with my second child, Megan did this 2 days a week. But practically, although it may benefit the child in terms of an introduction to education, it would not allow the parent to work. 2 hours 15 is not really enough to do anything much at all.