Hi,
Could someone please clarify what the minimum number of sessions per week a NEF child is entitled to. We currently have children who attend two days a week (in full day care setting) who are entitled to free childcare and the parents are charged for the second day only. Due to recent audit we have now been told that we will have to repay monies received for those children who only attended two days a week as we have been overpaid and should only have received a proportion of the full entitlement. ie no more than 5 hours??? If this is correct it means we are going to have to ask our entitled parents to pay more. Has anyone else been in this dilemma?
Look forward to hearing from you

It depends on your area. In ours parents can currently access a maximum of 3 x 2.5 hour sessions back to back in a day. That leaves them another 2 for the rest of the week and then anything over that is chargeable. If they come to you for 10 hours per day you would deduct the number of funded blocks they wished to pay for for that day and charge for the remainder e.g., if they come 10 hours x 5 days and want to offset 2.5 hours each day then each day is 2.5 free and 7.5 at your chargeable rates.

HOWEVER (Pressed wrong button sorry)

My LA has moved to hourly rather than sessional in readiness for September and is using the SFF guidlines eg 12.5 hours per spread within the SFF brackets of no more than 13 hours over 2 days etc.

Hope that helps

this is only on your own authority can realistically answer.. they all put their own criteria on the receiving of the funding, and while there is a similar allowance how they distribute it or allow settings to claim it is up to them

in our area they can now claim up to 15 hrs a week.. so not done in sessions but minimum of a 2hr block and then can add by per hour.
up to a maximum of 6 hours in any one day
over a minimum of 3 days in a week.

if they attend a different or second setting the money can be split.. which is where they say it will be worked out proportionally.. not sure what that in reality means as they claim a number of hours in each setting adding up to 15 in any week.

When we were on 12.5 a week and we could claim 5 hrs funding max for one day.. and it was claimed in 2.5 hr sessions.

Is this where the 5 hrs funding comes from.. did you claim for only 1 day a week and hence the maximum being 5 hrs funding.. and if they attend another setting for more hours did they get the rest of the entitlement there?

Sorry cannot be much help but you need to contact your own LEA for clarification and ask them to explain it for you.

Inge

I thought you could only claim full entitlement if child attends for 3 days at a setting ( how ever many hours they may choose)- think I read this in NDNA national guidelines...

but they can claim part entitlement - we had some claiming for 2 days a week.. we just got the money for hours attended..

hence the maximum hours to claim in any day - unable to claim full entitlement unless 3 days are attended .

Inge