When Your Child Starts School: The Childcare Bill Nobody Warns You About
Parents spend four years counting down to school, on the assumption that school is free and the childcare bill stops. Then reception starts, the school day turns out to be six and a quarter hours long, and the thirteen weeks of school holidays arrive with no nursery to cover them.
The bill does not stop. It changes shape. For a lot of families it gets smaller, but it also gets lumpier, harder to predict, and much harder to book. This is what actually changes and how to plan for it.
The two gaps
A typical primary school day runs from about 8.45am to 3.15pm. A typical full-time job does not. So there are two gaps to fill.
The daily gap. Roughly an hour in the morning and two to three hours at the end of the day, five days a week, 38 weeks a year. That is covered by breakfast club and after-school club, sometimes called wraparound care.
The holiday gap. Around 13 weeks a year, of which most parents have five or six weeks of annual leave to cover, and that is if they take none of it as an actual holiday. The rest is holiday clubs, family, or two parents carefully staggering their leave so they barely see each other.
The holiday gap is the one people underestimate. Nursery closes for a fortnight at most. School closes for six weeks in the summer alone.
What It Costs
Wraparound and holiday care is priced per session rather than per hour, and it varies enormously by area and by whether the school runs it or an external provider does. Rather than quoting an average that will not match your school, work out your own figure from the school's published prices, which are usually on the website or available from the office.
The structure to plan around looks like this.
| Type | Typically charged | When |
|---|---|---|
| Breakfast club | Per session | 38 weeks |
| After-school club | Per session, sometimes split at 4.30pm and 6pm | 38 weeks |
| Holiday club | Per day or per week, often full days only | 13 weeks |
| Childminder before and after school | Per hour, sometimes with a minimum | Either |
Holiday clubs are usually the highest daily rate of the lot, because they run a full day and often include activities and trips. A week of holiday club can easily cost more than a week of nursery did.
The good news: your existing help continues
This is the part parents most often miss. Both of the main schemes carry on into school age.
Tax-Free Childcare can be used for registered after-school clubs, breakfast clubs and holiday clubs. The child stays eligible until 1 September after their 11th birthday, or until they are 16 if they are disabled. So the £2 for every £8 you pay in continues, up to £500 every three months, or £2,000 a year per child. For a disabled child it is £1,000 every three months, up to £4,000 a year.
The Universal Credit childcare element also continues, covering up to 85% of registered childcare costs up to £1,071.09 a month for one child or £1,836.16 for two or more, up to the September after the child turns 16.
As always, you cannot have Tax-Free Childcare and Universal Credit at the same time, and the provider has to be registered for either to apply. Ask the club for its registration number before you book, particularly for holiday clubs run by sports coaching companies, where registration status varies.
A worked comparison
Take a family with one child moving from three days a week at nursery to full-time school with wraparound care.
Before, at nursery: £620 a month invoiced after funded hours, all year.
After, in reception: breakfast club and after-school club five days a week during term, plus roughly seven weeks of holiday club across the year once annual leave is used.
Term-time care at, say, £22 a day across 190 school days is £4,180.
Holiday club at £35 a day for 35 days is £1,225.
Annual total: £5,405, or about £450 a month averaged out.
Through Tax-Free Childcare, the government adds 20%, so you pay about £360 a month and the top-up covers the rest, subject to the £500 per quarter cap.
Cheaper than nursery, but only if you actually book the care. The trap is planning on the term-time figure and then discovering the holiday cost in July. Put the holiday club money aside monthly from September, in the same way you would save for any other predictable annual cost.
Booking: earlier than you think
After-school club places at popular schools go quickly, and some schools allocate by priority criteria rather than first come first served. Ask about the process at the point you accept the school place, not in August.
Holiday clubs are worse. Summer places at the better-run clubs are often gone by May, and prices sometimes rise closer to the date. Get the dates in the diary in the spring term.
Two things worth asking every provider:
- What is the cancellation policy? Booking a full six weeks and then paying for weeks your child does not attend is a common and expensive mistake.
- Do they take children with additional needs? Some holiday clubs do not have the staffing, and finding this out in July is far too late.
Other things that change at school age
- Free school meals. In England, all children in reception, year 1 and year 2 get a free school meal through the universal infant free school meals scheme. Beyond that it is means tested, and the criteria differ across the UK. Check whether you qualify, because registering also unlocks other support the school receives.
- Uniform, trips and clubs. Small individually, significant annually. Schools in England must follow statutory guidance on keeping uniform costs down, and many run second-hand uniform sales.
- INSET days. Usually five a year, and they are not covered by wraparound care. They land on ordinary working days and catch parents out every single time.
- Illness. Schools exclude for longer periods than nurseries for some illnesses, and there is no equivalent of a nursery keeping a mildly unwell child for the afternoon.
Working patterns worth considering
School hours are what finally make part-time or flexible work viable for a lot of parents, because the gap you need to cover is smaller. Two patterns come up repeatedly:
Compressed hours. Working your full hours across four longer days gives you one weekday free, which covers a chunk of the holidays without using annual leave and removes a day of wraparound cost.
Staggered start and finish between two parents. One does drop-off and starts late, the other finishes early and does pick-up. It removes the need for wraparound entirely, at the cost of both parents having inflexible days.
Employees in the UK have the right to request flexible working, and the request has to be dealt with reasonably. It is not a right to have it granted, but a well-argued request that explains how the work still gets done is granted far more often than a vague one.
Plan the first year before it starts
Get the school's term dates and INSET days as soon as they are published, mark every non-school weekday on a calendar, and put your annual leave against them. Whatever is left is what you need to buy. Doing that exercise in June rather than August is the difference between choosing your childcare and taking whatever is left.
The childcare cost calculator handles school-age costs as well as nursery ones, so you can see the annual figure rather than the weekly one. The guide to UK childcare costs covers the schemes in more depth, and the practical cost-cutting tips apply just as much once children are at school.