How Are You Going To Provide 15 Hours In Birmingham

[Guest]

I would be interested to hear how providers in Birmingham are planning to provide the 15 hours funding as from september. We currently run 9.00 t0 11.30 and 1.00 to 3.30. If it was straightforward we could offer 9.00 to 12.00 and 1.00 to 4.00, but with it having to be more flexible than that, what are other providers proposing?

 

Any help on what to offer parents would be most helpful.

[Guest]

We used to offer 9 - 11.30 and 12.45 - 3.15. These hours were inline with school start and finsih times.

 

Now we run 9 - 12 and 12 - 3.

 

The last half an hour of the morning session and the first half an hour of afternoon session are for lunch

 

Lunch time CAN be counted into your 3 hours.

 

It has worked really well for us.

 

We have been doing it for almost 3 years now as we were a pathfinder county.

 

The nursery is maintained during the morning sessions and it goes "private" (still run by school with same staff though) from 11.30.

 

Although nursery finishes at 3pm afterschool kicks in from there until 6pm.

 

Breakfast club isn't classed within this wraparound care but basically we could have a child in school from 7.45am till 6pm

 

At present you have to be a morning child wanting to do more than 15 hours to access any afternoons because funding from the maintained places is not shared at all.

 

However I suspect with the single funding formula many changes are afoot and this may soon mean children able to come to us and do their 15 hours over 2.5 days!

[Rea]

The letter that came with the last funding form said details about the 15 hours will be coming out soon, so we're just going to wait and see what that says. The guidance for LEAs that someone posted on here, I think it was Maz, said it understands that not all roviders will be able to offer more due to having rented premisis so I take that to mean we dont have to offer anything more than we are able. It'll be interesting to see how funding is dished out in that respect though.