30 Hours Childcare - 4 days a week confusion

Balding2fast

Hi,
We recently had our first child and will both be back in full time work next September. We are trying to navigate around the free childcare minefield and have got a bit confused with what happens if we don't plan on doing 5 days a week in the nursery.
From Sept 25, we will be entitled to the 30 hours for 9 month olds and above. We have been told by some nurseries that their funded hours are 9am to 3pm daily and that any hours we want outside of this need to be paid as extra, which is all clear. Our confusion arises when we hope to only need the nursery 4 days a week. Do we just lose the remaining 6 hours of free childcare or are we technically allowed to split it across the other 4 days. Am I right in saying the funded hours only have to fall within default school hours so 9am-3pm and anything outside of this would have to be paid by parents regardless of whether they've used their full 30 hour quota for that week?

My partner is a teacher so ideally we're also not wanting to stretch to the 52 weeks and keep it at the 38 weeks term time as appreciate we could maybe get around the 4 days a week by stretching it and therefore reducing our total weekly funded hours but this would be a plan B for us.

Thanks!

sheramber

The nursery are entitled to stipulate what hours they will provide free.

A nursery csn decline to offer any free hours. 

Nurseries restrict the hours per day due to the low level of funding that the Government supply to them, which does not fully cover their costs.  They make up the cost by charging for extras and the  additional hours per day.

You can claim up to 30 hours free so any not used are lost.

The nursery only claim for the free hours used. 

You can use the tax free childcare and claim the Government subsidy to help towards for the hours outside the free ones.

Time2count

I'd also suspect that unless the nursery specifically offers term time only places they will want/ need you to continue paying for a place for the full year (even if not using it) as they can't afford to have an unused place for the 14 weeks you don't want it.