Nursery free hours

I send my little girl for 14.5 hours a week and we don't have to pay anything. Check with each nursery though as some of them only allow you take it in bigger blocks - full days as opposed to half days x

That should be fine but lots of nurseries will charge a "consumables" fee so it may not actually be free. Ours is pretty high at £2.40 an hour but I have seen others paying less.

We send mine for 9 hours - we pay £7 for consumables and £10 for the extra hour but still pretty good value I feel.

It depends on how your nursery operates. Some do by the hour, some do half day blocks and some do full day only. Ours does things by the half day with a minimum attendance of 1 full day or 2 half days. They average out the hours across the year and their cost per hour (gov pays less than it costs per hour) so we get 11.5hrs a week funded at ours. A full day at our nursery is 8am-6pm, so we basically get 1 funded day and a smidge off day 2 (my boy goes in 2 days a week).

Ours does just the free hours if you don't want any others!

I'm currently in the process of this and asked th3 nursery this same question. Mine said I can send them for the 2 mornings I want ( 6hrs) and would just pay the consumables fee

I think every nursery differs, we have to send ours for 4 half days as that’s the minimum , she does 8-1 and with the hours we’ve spread it to all year rather than just term time as between us we just don’t have enough holidays to cover the school holidays and we pay around £380 per month