Increasingly, Trusts are looking for ways to generate revenue. With fewer opportunities to make savings, attention is turning from lowering expenditure, to raising income.

Around 80% of primary schools now offer breakfast and after school childcare, and Trusts are beginning to sense the opportunity around revenue generation through the provision of high quality, well priced clubs.

Trusts repeatedly tell us that whilst they (usually) know which schools have care onsite, they do not have the necessary reporting, insight and data in order to be able to build a cohesive childcare strategy.  With the relevant data, opportunities can be identified, gaps can be closed, and a broader Trust strategy on, say, pricing, can be adopted.  But!  The strategy needs to be based on reliable data – as opposed to historic precedence, or worse yet, gut feel.

To what degree can your Trust answer the following questions with confidence?

Furthermore, which of your schools’ clubs are:

If your Trust is like most, the answer to those questions will be at best, “I know some of this”, or more likely “I can’t answer these with confidence”.  With childcare income often exceeding £500k a year, this is a problem, right?

In order to make informed decisions, Trusts need accurate data across three key areas.  These are:

  1. Attendance & Capacities
  2. Income & Payment Collection
  3. Pricing

In this blog, we will focus on common challenges Trusts face in getting reliable data across each of these areas, and how to sense-check if these problems exist in your Trust.

Attendance & Capacities

Do you know, for sure, how many children are attending each of your school’s clubs?  Do your schools know?  Although this may seem obvious, it is not necessarily straightforward.  When looking at a register for a random Tuesday at Afterschool Club, in (for example) your MIS, is that register showing you:

Why does this matter?  Well, apart from the obvious safeguarding element of knowing which children should be with you, it matters because the answer to these three questions can be significantly different, and the impact on revenue equally substantial.  Experience shows that, more often than not, schools will use their booking system as a financial tool, but when asked for attendance information, will give broad estimated averages, which are often quite different from reality.

To sense check this, ask a selection of your schools to record actual attendance in club over the course of a week.  Compare this to the registers held within the school’s booking system, and the relevant income report.  9 times out of 10 these three elements will not balance, and it is in this gap that you can start to articulate the case for improved booking, payment and admin support.

Once you have understood and made steps to validate this data, you can begin to look for opportunities to potentially increase capacities where clubs are full, or focus marketing efforts to fill up under occupied clubs.

Income & Payment Collection

Making sure that income is maximised, must be the number one priority for Trusts when considering their childcare. However, having confidence that every booked session is being paid for, in every school (or quantifying shortfalls for that matter), is an impossible task.

The reason why?

Because the school’s chosen payment, booking or management information system is not fit for purpose, and unable to provide accurate and reliable data to ensure all revenue is being collected.  Schools (naturally) look for existing systems to manage their childcare, often before they realise how complex the booking, payment and admin can be.

To check if your schools are receiving every penny of income, you can start by completing a basic calculation:

Average daily attendance   x   Average Price   x   Number of sessions

However, the devil is in the detail with this calculation:

Once you have this figure, review how it compares to the school’s reported income over the same period.  Ensure that you remove any revenue from that reported income that does not relate to this period, such as parent payments on account (for future use), or payments received late for earlier periods of childcare.

Typically, 90% of schools will have a lower reported income then calculated income, and it is this gap that begins to demonstrate the potential shortfall in revenue that is being lost on an annual basis, for each of your schools.

Pricing

Schools have historically set up their childcare to meet the needs of their communities, with many having taken decisions on key issues such as pricing prior to joining the Trust, and often without reference to the going rate for childcare in that school’s area.  In addition to this, pricing between schools in the same Trust, and often in the same demographic area, can vary significantly.  It is difficult for Trusts to explain why some childcare is more expensive than others, especially when on the surface, they may mirror one another in terms of opening hours and activity offer.

We talked about how to think about setting prices in one of our earlier blogs, but for a sense check – use our pricing ready reckoner, which will give you the market rate for wraparound childcare within 5 miles of each of your schools.  All you will need is their postcode.

Whilst considering moving to more realistic prices (in a cost-of-living crisis) can be daunting, there are ways in which this can be achieved, without the majority of your parents ending up with substantially higher fees.  By pushing more parents towards accessing help with childcare costs (take-up nationally is chronically low), parents end up paying the same as they pay now, but with a government top-up that increases your revenue.  It’s a longer-term piece of work, but the benefits can be huge.

We hope this blog has been of help, but if you would like some support and some additional tools to begin to look at this in the detail that it deserves, please do get in touch.  We would be delighted to help. 

Universal Free Breakfast Clubs (UFBC) have enjoyed a successful rollout across over 1,000 schools so far.  The government and the DfE seem very happy with the program, so much so that it seems that the shift from schools being invited to join, to being told to join, is well underway.

For many schools who already run a paid-for breakfast club, this raises operational challenges around staffing, catering and facilities.

But perhaps more importantly, it gives them a conundrum to solve: what do they do to their existing pricing to allow for the 30 minutes free childcare before school?

Many of the schools that we work with have already joined the program, and here’s what we have learned supporting them so far:

Tell the parents early, and be clear in your justification

Whichever pricing strategy you choose, it’s important to let your parents know well in advance, and for that the decision to be underpinned by logic.  Those schools that have taken this approach have received positive feedback from their communities.  Those that have fudged it have just introduced another opportunity for parents to voice their displeasure!

We have found two coherent approaches to pricing that have consistently worked:

Option 1 – Hold your pricing

Some schools have chosen to keep their pricing the same, and use the funding to offset a future planned price rise.

The message to parents is:

This is a helpful approach for schools who regularly review pricing, where parents are used to incremental rises.

However, the majority of schools do not regularly review their pricing, so we have found an alternative option that has worked equally as well:

Option 2: Match your fee reduction to the funding rate – reduce prices by £1

This is the most common approach adopted by schools, and there is definitely something to be said for the inherent logic in it.

Communication to parents is as follows:

Parents seemed to have seen the logic in this, and schools report this approach has been accepted without any negative feedback.

From a financial perspective, a well-run UFBC can be cash generative. If you’d like to find out how, please do get in touch and we would be delighted to help you think it through 

When talking to these schools the same key objection comes up time and time again, when you ask them if they have considered running the care for themselves: staffing.

So, are you put off from bringing your onsite childcare in house by the idea of staffing challenges?

If so, here are five key learnings from our 20 years in wraparound childcare that will help you overcome this issue:

1. Dispel the 7am myth

It’s noticeable how often the following comment sums up the barrier to schools considering in-house care:

“I don’t want to be responsible for finding cover for the breakfast club when somebody calls in sick at 7am, or worse still, I will have to cover the club myself”.

This is completely understandable; senior leaders are already immensely stretched, and the thought of having to cover a breakfast club, rather than prepare for the day ahead, is unthinkable. However, staff absences from clubs are typically low, and when they do occur, there are ways to ensure they’re dealt with without any SLT input. Read on to find out how.

2. Understand the ratio requirements

This… is the biggie.

Ratios are much more flexible than schools realise.

Whilst ratios are strict for preschool children, there aren’t fixed ratios for school-age children. Instead, Ofsted expects providers to carry out a risk assessment and ensure sufficient staff to supervise children safely.

In practice, this means schools can set sensible ratios (usually 1:10), that they operate to on a normal day. Schools then establish a comfortable drop-point — the minimum number of staff they require to continue supervising children safely in the event of unexpected staffing changes.

A busy, £150k+ a year club will typically have 35+ kids in breakfast club and 50+ in after-school care. This means on a normal day, you’ll have 4 staff in the morning and 5 in the afternoon. But you can, as long as your staff are skilled, drop down to as few as two staff a morning and three an afternoon, whilst maintaining these attendance numbers, to cope (for a short period) with illness/absence. Yes, it’s not ideal, and yes, you may have to adjust the club schedule, but it’s far more preferable than SLT getting dragged into making toast or running activities.

The parents will understand (and be grateful you’re still open), and as long as it doesn’t last too long, the kids won’t mind either.

3. Use the power of your income – appoint a great manager to deal with everything, including staff absence

Schools that run large clubs keep close to 40% of the income and return it to their school budgets. In a £150k a year club – that’s £60,000 a year. Every year.

Many use this income to appoint a great manager – often an ex-teacher who can not only run a great club but also deal with staff absences (and the logistical challenges this may create). When we ran our own commercial provider, all of our clubs were run by ex-teachers, each earning £30,000 a year, working term-time only. This was a hugely attractive job for teachers leaving the profession, and, crucially, it meant we could delegate almost everything to a qualified professional with the relevant experience to deal with parents, behaviour management, staff management, reporting to SLT, etc.

Supporting over 2,000 children a day, across 20+ school sites, our senior staff have never had to cover staff absence at the club.

4. But – where will we find the staff? The power of TUPE

One of the great things about bringing the care in-house is that TUPE applies, meaning the staff have the right to “follow the work”. In essence, the staff can stay with the club and become the school’s employees. There is a process to follow, and the staff must be made aware of any proposed changes to their current contract (as a result of changing employers), but 99% of the time, they choose to stay.

The reason?

Staff are primarily loyal to the children and the families they support, usually above their employer. Plus, people don’t particularly like change, and best of all, school Ts & Cs are usually better, meaning an improvement to their contractual terms. It makes the whole process pretty straightforward, as the school’s pension contributions, pay scales, and general employment terms will almost always be equal to or better than their current terms.

As a school, you have the chance to train the staff to reflect your school’s values, and for those that don’t measure up, you are allowed to move them on, like you would any other staff.

5. You can now recruit more strategically

Once you’re up and running, and churn occurs in the school support staff team, you can begin to look at more varied contracts: 7.30am – 2.30pm (to include breakfast club, 10.30am – 6pm (to include afterschool club), apprentices, etc. Indeed, your existing support staff may well be interested in additional hours, allowing you to build a team of high-quality bank staff who can again cover for staff absences.

Many Business Managers that I speak to have a sense that there are issues with bad debt, and they tend to be able to point to certain individual parents who have a history of problematic payments.

However, there is an additional element of bad debt which often sits below the surface, and, unless you know how to look for it, it can remain unreported for years on end. These occur when children attend, often unexpectedly, and there is a breakdown in the communication between club and office staff in terms of ensuring the relevant payment is taken. It is nobody’s fault, just an indication of how busy school life is.

It often comes as a surprise to School Business Managers that this is happening in their school; often, they don’t think this issue is relevant to them. But, there is a quick way to check, which is to compare Calculated and Reported income.
Compare your Reported Income for last year, with your Calculated Income. You can work out your Calculated Income by multiplying your average attendance across the year, by average session cost, by the number of days the club was open. In 90% of schools that we work with, there was a shortfall between Calculated Income (what you should be getting if everyone was paying for every session), and Reported Income.

To look at this in more depth, please have a look at another of our blogs.

Practical Steps to remove bad debt

Here are three practical steps that you can take to minimise (and hopefully) completely remove bad debt:

Step 1 – Ensure payment in advance

My counsel to you is to step back and review your payment terms with a fresh pair of eyes. Do they encourage parents to pay in advance? Indeed, do they require parents to pay in advance? If not, this is the key change you need to make. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for payment in advance – parents just need to be organised and changing to this approach will make a big difference.

Step 2 – Review your Ts & Cs

Very often we find that schools have created Ts & Cs, balancing their existing school IT systems, and the amount of time they can spare to run the childcare administration. More often than not, this will involve using the schools’ MIS, or a dedicated payment provider, neither of which are fit for purpose when taking payments for childcare.

Review your payment and booking Ts & Cs. The best way to ensure parents pay on time, every time, is to ask for monthly payment, in advance, for permanent bookings (those bookings which repeat on the same pattern, on a weekly basis), and to require ad-hoc bookings to be paid for at the time of booking. If your systems do not allow for this, then your chances of completely removing bad debt are remote. However – this is something we can help you with, so do get in touch if you would like to find out more about our support.

Step 3 – Accept (and hold) parent credit on account

We have processed more than 7 million bookings over the years, and if we have learned one thing from this, it is that parents want the simplest payment administration possible. Many parents will have a surplus sat in their relevant Tax-Free Childcare or Childcare Voucher accounts, and would prefer to send this as one lump sum to the school, to be used for future bookings.

This approach has obvious advantages: it minimises the number of transactions you need to reconcile, it reduces the communication between the school and the parent, and it minimises the risk of bad debt. Simply offering this to your existing parent cohort may well have a significant effect on reducing your administration, and puts you in control of taking the relevant payments for parent’s bookings.

But – at the end of the day, all of this administration is a pain, and a drain on your time.

It can be made much easier by working with us. We completely remove bad debt by having hyper-focused and proactive systems and administrators in place to ensure you get every penny that is owed to you.

There are a few key decisions to take on pricing, and in this blog, we look at these in turn, and consider the pros and cons of each. Hopefully you will find it useful in designing your pricing model.

1. Setting the Headline Price

Choosing where to set your pricing can be tricky – no one wants to undercharge, and be left just getting by, but equally, no one wants to appear greedy. The good news is, there is a good place to start, from which you can adjust your price up or down as you see fit.

How to find out the market rate for wraparound care in your area.

Visit www.childcare.co.uk and on the top ribbon, enter that you are looking for a childminder, and enter your school’s postcode. Once you press go, a blue box will appear in the top right corner, giving you the average hourly rate for a childminder within 5 miles of your postcode.

Next, using our (very reliable) rule of thumb, multiply this hourly rate by 80%, and then by the length of your club session. So, for example, if the average hourly rate for a childminder is £5.50, the market rate for your club would be:

Over the last 20 years working in this sector, this method has proven time and time again to be an infallible estimate of the cost that commercial wraparound providers will be charging locally. You can of course do your own market research, but this will save you a lot of time! This gives you a place to start budgeting from, and from there, you can adjust your fees (if required) as you see fit.

2. Discounts

What types of discounts should I consider offering?

Many clubs offer discounts for a range of booking options, such as (but not limited to):

Sibling discount
Usually when both children are booked into the same session

Multi-day discounts
For instance, book 4 or 5 mornings/afternoons and get a reduced rate on each day booked, or receive a day free

Combination discount
For instance, book both breakfast and after school care and receive a lower total price

Should I offer discounts?

Termtime childcare is overwhelmingly used by parents who need it, as opposed to extracurricular clubs which have a larger contingent of those booking more for enrichment than childcare. Therefore, offering discounts rarely encourage parents to book for more sessions than they need – they simply need the sessions they need. Discounts do, however, just feel fair – particularly to those parents who require care every day, and/or for more than one child.

Keeping your discounts simple and understandable

Be careful not to create discounts that are hard to calculate, or you may create problems in the future. The rule of thumb is: if you have to explain your discounts more than once to a parent (or administrator), it’s too complex. If you want to use an online booking system, the simpler your discounts, the better.

Discounts – Pros

Discounts – Cons

Our recommendation: If you want to offer a discount, a sensible place to start is offering 10% off for a sibling, or for booking 4 or 5 sessions in a week. Naturally, only some parents will qualify, and it doesn’t actually reduce your income by much at all. Parents will appreciate the offer – it’s a win-win.

3. Charging for the whole session vs staggered pricing (offering an option to pay for part of the session only)

Example: you want to run a breakfast & afterschool club for 30 children and plan to offer split sessions:

Breakfast Club

Session Time Price
7.30am – school £5
8.15am – school £3

Afterschool Club

Session Time Price
3.15pm – 4.30pm £5
3.15pm – 6pm £10

Intuitively, this feels fair. Some parents will only need the shorter session, so it seems fair that they don’t have to pay for a full session – right?

Be careful! Clubs can typically expect a 50/50 split of parents who will want each slot, meaning you will likely have for example, 30 kids from, 3.15pm – 4.30pm, and perhaps only 15 for the last 90 minutes. By offering a shorter initial afternoon slot, you will also (unintentionally) begin to compete with in-house (and externally provided) after-school enrichment clubs, which may lead to those clubs losing attendance to your club, or vice versa. It can be a minefield!

Other considerations when contemplating a stagger:

1. Staffing

Offering staggered sessions can make staffing extremely difficult, as you will only need certain staff for the first 75 minutes each afternoon, or the last 45 minutes each morning, whilst your club is at capacity. Finding high quality people for this short a period can be very challenging. You need to be able to offer potential employees a decent number of hours to attract/retain them. See our blog on recruitment/retention in breakfast & afterschool care for more thoughts on this.

2. Impact on income

By offering a stagger, you will reduce your income. This may not matter, but it needs to be factored into your income & expenditure projection.

3. Parents arriving early or not collecting on time

Parents will, on the whole, collect on time at the end of the afternoon session. Typically, this is because they don’t want their child to be the last one to be collected, and there is a certain embarrassment to being late. However, if a parent has paid up until 4.30pm, the pressure of their child being left alone is removed, as the club carries on until 6pm.

In addition, parents will inevitably arrive early for the 8.15am session, in the hope of beating the rush hour traffic. Whilst your staff are sorting breakfast etc, can they be expected to tell parents they have to wait for 5/10 minutes before their child is allowed to come into club? It’s a tough ask.

Both of the above scenarios can cause problems with ratios, and (if you are serving food), planning for mealtimes.

Staggered Sessions – Pros

Staggered Sessions – Cons

Our recommendation: Be brave and offer full sessions. Staggered sessions typically cause more problems than they solve. It’s helpful to keep your offer to parents clearly defined and separate – if parents want a short amount of care, their child has a range of 1 hour enrichment clubs to choose from. If they need childcare – then your club is available, but full sessions need to be booked. (You will often find that parents accept this without issue and will use any spare time after work to run errands – often arriving 2 minutes before club closes!)

As much as I’d like to think my thoughts on this subject are a gripping read(!), I’m realistic enough to know that it’s highly likely you’re struggling with some aspect of this, which has led you to find this blog on Google.

Secondly, I’m not going to do what most blogs do, which is provide advice purely designed to lead you to the conclusion that you should work with us! The rest of our website will demonstrate what we can do. In this blog, I’m going to provide you with my advice in a straightforward way.

Hopefully, it is of some use and helpful in your thinking about how to tackle this problem.

The Context

Many schools that we speak to, and go on to support, have been running the booking, payment, and administration for their wraparound care in-house, using existing systems.

They have come to us because the management of this has outstripped the capability of their systems, or the volume of work has increased to unmanageable levels—or both.

The Issues

The staff responsible for doing the admin are always very clear on the problems they are facing. These can be broadly broken down into three categories:

1. System workarounds: Having to create manual workarounds to make the acceptance of payments work with an existing MIS or payment provider system.

2. Payment volume & complexity: The sheer volume and complexity of payments has become too much. This includes managing receipts from the Universal Credit Reclaim Scheme and processing Tax-Free Childcare and Childcare Vouchers.

3. Credit control: It is becoming increasingly difficult to be confident that every penny is being collected and every booking accurately recorded.

The Crux of the Problem

The root of these issues usually comes down to two key factors.

Firstly, the Terms & Conditions (T&Cs) that the schools operate on are often not fit for purpose. While once suitable, they are rarely reviewed on an annual basis to ensure they meet the growing demand for childcare and the associated administrative pressures.

Secondly, the systems are creaking under the strain. Systems that once worked for a smaller number of bookings and payments are now struggling to cope with a higher volume of booking requests, changes, and payments.

Acknowledging the History

T&Cs are often created by schools in the first instance to balance two factors: being reasonable with the booking & payment rules for parents, and acknowledging the capacity in the school office. In addition, they will consider how any existing systems might be used to support this. This is a sensible and utterly reasonable place to start and will often be fit for purpose at the beginning.

As the club grows, many schools will amend their T&Cs to cope with the volume of bookings, commonly restricting parents’ choice by forcing them to book a half term or term at a time.

Systems will often require parents to repeatedly log on and fill in the same information for bookings, rather than facilitating a rolling weekly pattern that runs until further notice. This is far from ideal from a parent’s perspective and will inevitably lead to some parents not using the service as much as they would have if the booking process was fit for purpose.

Let’s consider these points in turn, and what you can do to improve things.

The System is No Longer Fit-for-Purpose

This is the most common reason for people to call us. Typically, they will be managing their payments through a school payment provider or through their MIS. Both facilities allow for the collection of payments and a basic level of booking.

However, neither is suitable for larger breakfast and after-school club provisions.

MIS and payment provider club “bolt-on” features are designed around supporting extracurricular activities, such as a one-hour after-school sports club with a set termly fee. They cannot cope with the complexity of recurring bookings across different days. Crucially, neither can accommodate payment via Tax-Free Childcare or Childcare Vouchers (which will typically account for 40% of a club’s revenue).

Terms and Conditions

Standard terms and conditions in wraparound childcare, and those adopted by every successful commercial operator, are that:

These T&Cs make sense from a commercial and practical perspective. Providers are able to predict attendance levels and, in turn, staff and equip the club accordingly.

But more importantly, the T&Cs promote the booking behaviour that you want for a successful club. Parents rely on the childcare service and appreciate the security of a permanent booking; in exchange, they accept that they are unable to cancel individual sessions. More parents tend to make a permanent booking, which makes everything about the club more predictable and stable.

It can be difficult to consider adopting these more rigorous Terms & Conditions, but in doing so, the administrative processes will become more streamlined.

Steps to Take

If this sounds familiar, here are three practical steps you can take to start improving the situation:

1. Review your T&Cs: Do they reflect the current size of your club, or are they still reflective of an earlier (possibly smaller) version?

2. Review your payment processing: Does your system provide the facility for the automatic allocation of Tax-Free Childcare and Childcare Vouchers? Does it allow for recurring bookings with variable patterns?

3. Talk to us: If you’d like some advice, or just to sense-check your thinking, why not give us a call and have a chat with one of our experienced team? We promise there won’t be any hard sell—we are confident that our business and the results we have achieved speak for themselves. But we are also wraparound childcare nerds(!) and love to help people improve their processes.

Over the last 20 years my colleagues and I built & ran one of the largest wraparound childcare providers in the country. During that time, we employed hundreds of staff, and found the following few factors served us well when recruiting:

How to attract staff

1. Talk about why working with children is so rewarding

We found our recruitment was most successful when we started by telling people why working with children was such a truly rewarding job. Talking about the joy of helping children grow, learn and develop had a big impact on both the number and quality of applications we received. It’s a wonderful job, so consider emphasising that inspirational message in your job descriptions.

2. Talk about what you can do with the club revenue

Stress the impact the revenue generated from your wraparound club can have on the lives of all children in the school. Perhaps you could talk about how some of the revenue is allocated towards provision to support children with additional needs? Or to improve playground facilities for the benefit for all? Again, by emphasising the impact of the role (as opposed to just talking about the specifics of the job), you are helping potential candidates see the value in their prospective job.

3. See staff churn as an opportunity, not a threat

As TA’s and midday meals supervisors leave, rather than simply replacing their role, consider blending it with a job in your wraparound club. Once you combine the hours together, you may find a job becomes more attractive, and you may be able to recruit from a wider section of the employment market. After all, many of the skills are transferrable.

Where to find staff

1. Consider a partnership with a local childminder

Historically many clubs have been set up by childminders, whose service is at capacity and looking for more space. If you are looking for a Club Manager, you could look to form a partnership with a successful, entrepreneurial childminder who is keen to grow their business. Between the two of you, you can run an excellent service that meets the needs of the community, without either party having to take all the risks.

You may know of a suitable childminder who supports families in your school. Failing that, have a look at www.childcare.co.uk to find childminders in your area.

2. Look in your community

Be proactive in looking for staff in your community. You can use your school newsletter to advertise the positions, but also why not approach local preschools who run during school hours? Their staff are ideally suited in that they are well qualified, experienced, and crucially – not working before after school.

In addition, consider approaching local sixth form colleges, youth groups, sports clubs or churches (particularly if you have links with them), to see if there is anybody suitable in their communities. In addition, you may well find that there are school parents, or their friends or relatives, who are interested in changing career and working with children. Wraparound childcare jobs can be an excellent entry point for people considering careers in education.

3. Consider Apprentices

Apprentices can be an excellent option for employing keen, bright youngsters who are just starting out on their career in education. Not only can you teach them from the ground up, and mould them into the member of staff you want them to be, they are significantly cheaper to employ than other staff. There are a huge number of organisations that support apprentices throughout the course of their qualification, meaning all you have to do is provide them with the role. Your local authority should be able to signpost you to the relevant organisations.

Where to find your staff

Club Managers

Activity Leaders

All Roles

Job sites, such as www.indeed.co.uk, enable you to search for staff that have your chosen key words, and then contact them directly.

Good luck with your recruitment

Feel free to download our free template job descriptions

Download Free Job Descriptions

There are a range of schemes available to families to significantly reduce the cost of their childcare. Parents receive support from the government, meaning lower childcare costs, and schools still receive the full session cost. With these schemes being a win-win for schools and parents, why is take-up so low? And, what can we do about it?

Let’s start with a reminder of the schemes, who they’re for, and the amount they contribute to parent’s fees:

Scheme Contribution to Fees For which parents?
Universal Credit reclaim (UC) 85% Your FSM families
Tax-Free Childcare (TFC) and/or Childcare Vouchers (CCV) 20% All families where adults are working
Childcare Grant (CCG/CGPS) 85% Families with adults in education
MOD Wraparound Care Scheme 100% Military families

Why is the take up of these schemes so low?

All schools offering wraparound childcare are supposed to inform parents about the schemes available to support with childcare costs. But the more parents accessing these schemes, the more paperwork for the already stretched school office team. It’s not hard to see why advertising these schemes drops down a school’s priority list.

In our experience, there are many reasons why take up of the schemes is lower than you would expect. These include:

The Vicious Circle

It’s perfectly understandable that schools (when looking to support their parents) set their prices at a low level.

In my experience many schools will start the pricing conversation around the question:

“What is this provision going to cost us to run, and how many children are we likely to have?”

Once they have this information, they simply divide one by the other to create their session cost. Worse still, pricing will often then sit dormant, unreviewed for years at a time, despite the (unending) rise in costs of delivering the club.

The problem with this approach is it has two significant negative consequences:

For example…

A parent books three afternoons a week for their son:

– If the afterschool club is just £4 a session, parents will be much less likely to access Tax-Free Childcare to receive a (20%) £0.80p reduction per session, or £93 a year.

– However, if the club is £12, then £2.40 saved every session, for three afternoons a week, is a total saving of £280 a year.

Suddenly, it becomes much more worthwhile creating a Government Gateway account to access the Tax-Free Childcare scheme.

How to Communicate the Change

We regularly support schools looking to make a change in their pricing. They have realised the mistake of charging too little and need to charge an appropriate amount. Communicating that change to parents can be tricky, but the most effective way to do this in our experience is as follows:

1. Acknowledge how important the service is

“It is a vitally important part of the school day for much of our community”.

2. Reaffirm your aim and the budget reality

Reaffirm that your aim is continue to provide a high-quality wrapround service, but school budgets are stretched. In order to be able to continue providing a great service, a change in pricing is necessary.

3. Confirm when you last changed prices

“Our last price rise was in (e.g.) 2022, since when our costs (like every organisation) have continued to rise”.

4. Stress the need for parents to access support

“As a community, we need to use every element of financial support available.”

5. Now, the crucial bit: tell the parents what they will pay

Tell the parents what the headline price is going to be (for example, £5 for breakfast and £12 for afterschool club).

But, crucially, display the prices parents will pay based on their eligibility for the different childcare support schemes:

Our headline prices are £5 per morning, and £12 per afternoon. However…

What you will pay per club

Breakfast Afterschool For who?
£0.75 £1.80 For our Free School Meal-eligible families
£0.75 £1.80 For our families with adults in full time education
£0.00 £0.00 For our military families
£4.00 £9.60 For all other families

A Final Thought

Let them know these changes won’t come in to force straightaway We recommend giving parents at least one clear terms’ notice, and crucially, stick to your guns. Creating a Tax Free Childcare account, or registering for the Universal Credit Reclaim Scheme is a small amount of administration for a parent to do, that will make a massive difference to both their monthly expenditure and the school’s income.

But what if the most powerful tool isn’t something new you need to add, but something you already have?

The Game Has Changed: Schools as Community Hubs

Let’s be honest, the old 9-to-3 model doesn’t quite fit the reality for many working families anymore. Times have changed. The schools truly thriving today often see themselves differently – not just as educational institutions, but as vital community hubs.

They recognise their buildings and resources shouldn’t sit idle outside core hours. They are buzzing centres from early morning until evening, sometimes year-round. They aren’t just offering services; they are weaving themselves into the fabric of daily family life, and the community values them deeply for it.

trust childcare strategy

Your Untapped Asset: Wraparound & Nursery Care

If your school is facing the challenge of empty seats, take a fresh look at your existing nursery and wraparound care provision. Could this be your underestimated secret weapon?

Consider these points:

Parent Priority #1: For countless working parents, reliable, high-quality childcare isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’; it’s a fundamental necessity when choosing a primary school. It often ranks higher than many traditional factors. Are you making your offer impossible to ignore?

Funding the Mission: A well-managed, financially sustainable wraparound service doesn’t just cover its own costs. It generates unrestricted income – precious funds that can be reinvested directly back into your core educational mission, enhancing facilities, resources, or staffing, making your school even more attractive.

Building Deep Loyalty: When a school provides seamless, reliable care from nursery through to Year 6, from 8 am to 6 pm, it builds incredible loyalty. You become more than just a school; you become an indispensable partner in family life.

Making Your Offer Irresistible (The Subtle Shift)

Of course, just having wraparound care isn’t enough. To truly leverage it as a strategic asset, the quality and accessibility of the offer are key.

Parents need

  1. Flexibility: Easy ways to book regular and last-minute sessions.
  2. Simplicity: Clear communication and straightforward payment processes.
  3. Confidence: Knowing their child is safe, happy, and cared for. When the administration is smooth and the service is excellent, parents talk. That word-of-mouth is marketing gold.

A Final Thought

Tackling shrinking rolls demands more than just our usual approaches. It requires a fresh look – a strategic shift to see your school not simply as a place of learning, but as an indispensable part of your community. By truly getting the most from your wraparound and nursery provision, you’re doing much more than offering convenience; you’re cultivating deep loyalty, securing vital income, and ultimately, building a thriving, sustainable future for your school. That secret strength isn’t hidden; it’s ready to be fully unleashed.

Typically, around 10% of payments received will be customer credit. In larger provisions this can be in excess of £10,000 per year. However, it’s amazing how often schools are unable to give an accurate value for this credit.

Most commonly, schools will simply report the value of the cash into the bank, during a 12-month period, as their sales for that year.  Over the last 20 years, I have yet to meet a school that ringfenced this money, despite the fact that it’s not their money – and it definitely isn’t income!

So, why is this happening, and what can be done about it?

The main challenge that schools face is the systems they use typically apply payments received to bookings, as opposed to applying payments received to the parent/carer. This is because the system they are using (frequently their MIS or third-party software) has been built with fixed term events in mind, such as paying £10 as a contribution towards swimming this term, or paying £30 for 8 afterschool football club sessions.  The systems are not designed for recurring monthly bookings, with variable values dependent upon the number of days the school is open.

Why is this an issue?

Any business that holds credit for customers has a responsibility to keep that separate from its cash flow, as at any moment, the customer may request a refund of their credit. By not having this figure itemised, and separated from the remainder of their income, schools are leaving themselves open to financial problems in the future. We only have to cast our minds back to the pandemic, when all childcare closed for months at a time, to remember a time when many parents were quick to ask for their credit back.

What can be done about it?

In the first instance, schools need to keep hyper-accurate records of attendance (ensuring they exclude any children whose places are given for free). Secondly, they should move to matching payments to the person who has made the payment, as opposed to matching it to a specific booking or bookings.

But, fundamentally, without a booking system that can do this for you, and a support team to manage this process on your behalf, this is a very challenging task to stay on top of (without dedicated office staff time to do so).

At Childcare Bookings for Schools, we do all of this for you, with monthly remittance including the value of customer credit, held separately within a ringfenced bank account. It’s just one of the ways we can professionalise school childcare administration, which, if we are honest, is rarely the top priority for office staff!

If you recognise some of the challenges discussed in this blog, and you’d like to find out more about how we can help, we’d love to chat to you.