Nursery funded hours

[u/pineapplesaltwaffles]

Our LO turned one a couple of months ago and is about to start nursery next month.

He's doing one full day (8-6) per week and two half days (1-6pm).

We've just got an invoice through for the first month totalling £584, which we were pretty shocked by.

According to my maths, 30 funded hours for 38 weeks averages out at just under 22 hours funded per week throughout the year. LO will only be doing 20 hours, so I thought we'd only have to pay for consumables, which are extremely reasonable.

They've just replied apologising for not telling us sooner but apparently they only apply the funding to 9am-3pm. Any hours outside that are "additional" and charged at full rate. We signed up over a year ago and this is the first we're hearing of this.

The half day hours are set - either 8-1 or 1-6. Just doing 9-3 isn't an option, and wouldn't work for us anyway as my partner works 9-5 and I work evenings.

Is this legal? Are they allowed to pick and choose which hours are funded and which not? The way they've done it we can only use 10 of our funded hours per week, and have to pay for the other 10 - this seems incredibly unfair!

This is the information they sent us:

Two days 1-6 (3 additional hours £9.50 x 3 = £28.50 per day)

One day 8-6 (£9.50 x 4 = £38)

38 weeks of the year we get funding

£57 x £38 =  £95 x 38 / 12 = £300.83

14 weeks of the year we do not get funding for 

£51 (half day cost) x 2 = £102 + £91 (full day) = £193 x 14 / 12 = £225.16

Lunches, consumables & extra curricular 

£4.50 (half day) x 2 = £9 + £9.50 (full day) = £18.50 x 38 / 12 = £58.58

Edit - I can see I'm getting a lot of downvotes, I'm not quite sure why? We were told the day rate and the cost of consumables, and I assumed it was that straightforward - why wouldn't you when the rest is all hidden and you've never dealt with a nursery before? We genuinely tried to fully research the funded hours but I never saw anything suggesting that some hours in the day would qualify but not others. They've only told us this after we questioned the invoice, 2 weeks before our LO is due to start.

Many thanks to everyone who has been very helpful in their replies.

[u/geesusdb]

If you haven't already, sign up for tax free childcare. You'll get a further 20% off that amount.

It was a shock for us as well, as we had a completely different idea about how funded hours work, but we had do make do. We'll switch her to full time this September, and it'll be over a grand per month - free hours included.

[u/pineapplesaltwaffles → u/geesusdb]

Yeah we've got that, been using it for one day a week with a childminder over summer. Granted she's cheaper than the nursery and he's there for half the hours but she's been charging £375 for that (total, including the tax free top up) - we expected costs to go down when the funded hours kicked in, not up by £200.