New Government Funding Expansion 2024 - 2025
There are huge changes regarding the new funding, which started on 1st April 2024.
To help you navigate the journey we have some links for you to visit, which gives an overall guidance on what this means to you.
Children that are 2 years old on the 31st March 2024 will qualify for 15 hours a week funding. There are two options available to you:
- The hours can be taken over 38 weeks of the year ( the Academic Year – in short this means when the children are on school holidays there will be no funding available to you.) This is called Term Time Only Funding.
- The hours can be stretched across the year, this means you have less hours per week, but you do not have periods of full fee payments throughout the year. As stated this is called stretched funding.
Please note you will still be charged for food on days when your child is attending a funded session.
On September 1st 2024 the expansion of funding will include children from 9 to 23 months old.
To qualify your baby must be between 9 and 23 months old on the 31st August 2024.
If your baby is 9 months old during September 2024 you will need to apply for the funding with effect from January 2025.
To apply for the funding starting in September the applications will be open from May 12th 2024. You will need to provide the nursery with your NINO and date of birth along with the code that has been allocated to you so that it can be validated in readiness for the new term. Once everything is in place a Parent Funding Declaration will be sent to you for you to sign to enable the claim to be submitted for payment from the Local Authority. That is all you need to do – easy!!
If you have any questions that the links do not answer, please contact Gail on manager@smithfieldnursery.co.uk and we can go through it together.
September 1st 2025, is scheduled to bring further changes in the Government expansion initiative of funding.
Children from 9 months to school age will qualify for 30 hours funding.