Somerset offers 15 hours per week or 570 hours per year of Universal Early Years Entitlement (EYE for 3 and 4 year olds). These can be accessed in our setting. Parents may also qualify for the 15 hours per week or 570 hours per year of Extended Entitlement. There are certain criteria to access this extended funding, please see https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk for further details.

The maximum number of hours a week that can be claimed is 30 hours. Your Early Years Entitlement will be calculated based on the length of the session (in hours).

Currently this free entitlement is worth £4.71 an hour. This is your free funding entitlement, free to all parents at the point of delivery.

Our hourly charge/rate is slightly more (£5.50) as we provide:

• A fully qualified teacher in charge of the class supported by a qualified teaching assistant

• French lessons from qualified teachers

• Music lessons from qualified teachers

• P.E. lessons from qualified teachers

• Use of the Chard Prep School facilities

As these extra services come with some costs, we are able to charge a small fee in addition to the Early Years Entitlement funding. While one way to tackle this would be to levy a charge on each of these events individually this can quickly become very complex (e.g. attempting to apportion the marginal cost of the teacher’s expertise to each child) as well as very cumbersome to administer. Instead a small ‘extras’ charge is added to cover this funding gap because while not all ‘part-time’ children will necessarily access all of these additional services, all will access some of them.

Flexibility

If your child attends another setting as well as Chard Prep School, you can split the hourly entitlement and funding too. The maximum numbers of providers/settings you can attend at any one time is two.

Educational Nursery: The Lawns Children’s Nursery @ Chard Prep School              

The school works closely with The Lawns Children’s Nursery @ Chard Prep School which accepts children from 6 months upwards. For information about fees for the nursery, please email enquiries@thelawnschildrensnursery.co.uk