Dear parent/carer,
As you are already aware, from 1st January 2023 we intend to introduce an additional services charge for our 3 and 4 year old funded children. This is to ensure that the standard of childcare that we currently provide is maintained and continually improved, and so that we can continue to attract staff of a high quality to work for us. As always, we try and keep the increases to a minimum however inflationary forces outside our control are impacting heavily on the cost of running the business this year. They include the unprecedented wholesale fuel price increases, food price increases, resource price increases, contractor price increases in keeping the building safe and within safety regulations to name a few, further impacted by the living wage rate increase and National Insurance increase.
Over recent years, the 30hrs ‘free’ (subsidised) 3-4 year old funding rate has been affecting the non-funded rates in our nursery due to the hourly rate received being lower than the amount required to actually deliver the childcare place at the quality that we do.
Government Funding for Early Education has been historically underfunded and for many years there have been minimal or no increases. The Government state that the education must be free but that parents can expect to pay for everything else that we provide. At Broadway we pride ourselves on high quality provision and we are determined that this underfunding will not affect this. As you will be aware from previous letters, we have held off from introducing additional services fees for as long as possible but with the increases in all our costs outlined above between now and April, we must now introduce a voluntary additional services fee to ensure that we can continue to deliver quality provision and remain sustainable.
From January we will have an additional services fee of £1.50 per funded hour, this will be the fee that all new families will pay. However, as we want to thank you for your loyalty and continued support, we will reduce this to 75p per funded hour for all current families who are receiving funding with us or will shortly become eligible for this. We will not review this again until next year so you can be assured of this reduced rate for the whole of 2023.
We will still have to look at our usual annual fee increase in March 2023, in line with our business year and the impact of the above costs in general, but we will be writing to you separately about this in the new year once our new rates have been fully decided upon. On top of this, we have reviewed our policy on charging for Bank Holidays and will no longer charge for these from 1st January 2023.
We will be sending out some more information on this and as always if you have any queries you are always very welcome to contact us. We really do appreciate your continued support in doing all that we do for our children.
Assuring you of our best intentions and endeavours.
Yours Faithfully,
Sarah and Nick Shepherd
