Before the summer break the Minister for Education announced some Early Learning and Childcare Measures for implementation in 2024/25.
Part of that is the Northern Ireland Childcare Subsidy Scheme (NICSS) designed to reduce the childcare costs of eligible working parents by 15% for all qualifying children. The aim of this scheme is to help working parents with the affordability of childcare costs.
The subsidy scheme will target working parents who are eligible for or already using Tax Free Childcare (TFC) to pay their provider, be it a nursery, childminder, or like Evergreen Wood 🌲 a Playschool with families paying for places on offer Monday to Friday, 9.15am to 12.15pm.
Starting from 1st September 2024, any parent receiving TFC for a child who has not yet enrolled in primary school will be eligible to participate in the scheme, provided their childcare provider is signed up with HMRC as a TFC provider, which we are and some of our families already make use of that existing scheme to save money.
Families have to sign up separately for NICSS by visiting the Early Years Organisation who are administrating the programme. Parents visit here to sign up..
https://www.early-years.org/nicss/parents
..and FAQs about the scheme can be found here, get a coffee ☕️ it’s a lot of reading:
https://www.early-years.org/nicss/parentsfaq
General information can be found here:
https://www.early-years.org/nicss
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From the Evergreen Wood Team
Childcare costs in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole are recognised as high and this is due to the fact the sector is chronically underfunded by Government. As a pre-school the government pay us less than £4 per hour per child in our care and from that we have to fund a legally set number of staff, provide an education programme, materials, rent a space to do all of this, care for SEN children needing our support, and try to have daily fun doing it. The fun and care part we can handle, that’s an honour and a pleasure, the financial pressure is a bit much though 🫠.
This scheme while welcome for parents is only a small first step on a bigger journey that needs to be undertaken to give families the support they need in caring for their children, and for organisations like ours giving them a good foundation heading into education. We would encourage parents to provide support for groups like Melted Parents who are a vital voice for change in this process and keep pushing for a childcare solution that children deserve in their early years.
We’ve been asked if we are raising our fees for 2024/2025 as some providers have in general due to rising costs of their own, which is understandable as those costs have seen colleagues in the local area forced to close; however some rises are seemingly in response to the NICSS, which undoes potential savings for parents which we don’t agree with. So as we’ve been asked we are not raising our fees this incoming year in the hope a more stable solution comes to pass, quickly 🤞😬, rather than this somewhat complex scheme.
So if you’re joining us this year outside of our funded PSEP places our fees will remain at £12.00 per 9.15am to 12.15pm morning session. Hopefully with the savings families can make through the Tax Free Childcare scheme and NICSS we can help take some of the financial pressure off, even if children are coming to us for a morning adventure then traveling on to day care in the afternoon, savings should be able to be made. So if your family is eligible get signed up asap and let’s make the best of it! 🌲😊.