New Government Funding Expansion - September 2025
There are huge changes regarding the new funding, which started on 1st September 2025
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 9 months old on the 31st August 2025 will qualify for 30 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 that we do provide freshly cooked food should you choose this option the cost is currently £14 per day. This includes breakfast, mid-morning snack, two course lunch, afternoon snack and tea.
If you choose to bring in packed lunches, we do have a policy that has to be adhered to as we have children within the nursery with severe allergies. Please speak to our Team for further information on this option during your visit or give us a call.
To apply for the funding starting in September the applications will be open from May 12th 2025. 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 form 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.