Universal Credit provides essential financial support to individuals and families in the UK, particularly those who are on low incomes, are jobless or are unable to work. One crucial aspect of this support is childcare funding. In today’s detailed guide, we will delve into the details of free childcare through Universal Credit, explain who is eligible, what funding is available to those who are, how to claim, and more.
What is Universal Credit?
Universal Credit is a Government welfare benefit that was introduced to streamline the support available to eligible individuals and families. Its primary goal is to provide financial assistance to those who need it, taking into account various aspects of an individual or family’s financial situation.
Without getting too bogged down in unnecessary detail here, Universal Credit is thus named because it is replacing several existing benefits, including Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance (‘JSA’), Child Tax Credit, and others. Today, however, we’ll focus purely on the childcare funding element.
Who is Eligible for Childcare Funding Through Universal Credit?
Childcare funding through Universal Credit is primarily intended for parents on low incomes who require childcare services to either maintain current employment, increase working hours, or transition into paid work within a month. Eligibility caveats for you — and your partner if you have one — include the following:
- Except for a few exceptions, you usually both have to be in paid work, or have an offer of paid work for a position starting within a month.
- Earnings and income must fall within specific thresholds to qualify.
- The childcare provider you use must be officially registered/approved by OFSTED or equivalent.
- You must be living in the UK.
- You must be 18 or over, although there are exceptions for some aged 16 or 17.
- You should be below State Pension age.
- You must jointly have no more than £16k in savings or investments.
- The child(ren) for whom you are applying must be below the age of 17 (eligibility ends at the end of the August following their 16th birthday).
How Much Childcare Funding Can You Get Through Universal Credit?
The amount of childcare funding available through Universal Credit varies according to your individual circumstances. Generally speaking, though, Universal Credit can cover up to 85% of your childcare costs as follows:
• The maximum available for one child is £950.92 per month;
• The maximum available for 2 or more is £1,630.15 per month.
(Correct at date of publishing, late September 2023).
What Can the Childcare Funding be Used For?
Universal Credit childcare funding can be used for various childcare services, so long as they’re properly registered (e.g. with OFSTED or their equivalent in Wales and Scotland). Permitted types of childcare provision include:
- Nurseries: Licensed nurseries that provide care and early education for young children.
- Childminders: Individuals registered to provide childcare services in their homes.
- After-School Clubs: Organised programmes that offer care and activities for school-age children after school hours.
- Holiday Clubs: Similar to after-school clubs but available during school holidays.
- Preschools: Educational settings for children aged up to 5.
- Approved Childcare Providers: Some approved providers outside traditional settings may also be eligible for funding.
As well as funding standard nursery/preschool-type childcare sessions that allow you to work, the funding can also be used for other types of childcare provision that will help you transition back into work. It can potentially fund settling-in sessions before work to help your child transition into a new childcare setting, childcare provision for your child while you commute to your job, childcare required because of changing work patterns as part of a zero-hours contract, and childcare provision during the month following the loss of a job.
Caveats:
You can claim Universal Credit for Childcare at the same time as:
You cannot claim Universal Credit for Childcare at the same time as:
• Tax credits
• Tax-Free Childcare
How to Claim Your Childcare Costs Via Universal Credit
Except in special circumstances, you will need to pay for your childcare up front and then claim back the eligible part of it through the scheme. To successfully make your claim, you’ll typically need to:
- Keep records of your childcare provider’s registration number and contact details.
- Document your childcare costs with receipts or invoices.
- Provide evidence of your work or job offers.
- Claim within 2 months (latest) of incurring the childcare costs otherwise you may miss out.
- Regularly update the Universal Credit system with any changes in your childcare situation.
- To get started, apply for your online Universal Credits account here.
More information is available through the official Government website or via the Universal Credit helpline on 0800 328 5644.
Nursery Places at Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery, Edgbaston, Birmingham
At Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery in Edgbaston, we support all Government-funded childcare schemes so, even if you don’t qualify for free childcare support through Universal Credit, you may qualify for one or more of the alternative childcare funding schemes. These are there to help families with affordability, which nowadays is more important than ever. Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery offers a first-class childcare and early education service for babies, toddlers and preschoolers under five, offering them the very best start in life in a warm, nurturing environment. If you would like to explore the possibility of your child having a place at Leaps & Bounds, please do get in touch using one of the following options:
Rated as a Good Provider of childcare and early education by OFSTED, Leaps and Bounds is a nursery/preschool located in Edgbaston, near Birmingham, Ladywood, Bearwood, Harborne and Smethwick. We also operate our own Forest School, enabling children to benefit from everything that nature has to offer.
Information in this guide is given in good faith and is believed to be correct at the time of writing (late September 2023). Please check the Government website for the most up-to-date information.
Today’s article is a guide explaining the support available to children with Special Educational Needs & Disabilities. This is often referred to simply as ‘SEND’ or alternatively ‘SEN and disabilities’. Here, we will explore the importance of identifying SEND in children, the benefits of early intervention, and the various avenues available to help children affected. The information in this post should be useful to parents whose children may be impacted by special needs or disabilities and is one small part of our nursery’s serious commitment to supporting such children.
Early identification of SEND is of crucial importance and offers numerous benefits for children affected. Put simply, it allows support measures to be put in place at the earliest opportunity, thereby minimising any delay in the child’s learning and development progress. Timely interventions can lead to enhancements like better communication skills, increased independence, and vastly improved overall development. Such help will enhance a child’s learning experiences, improve their quality of life, and also foster a sense of inclusivity. Inclusion is incredibly important to children’s mental health and well-being — and avoids them feeling isolated and ‘different’.
The resulting tailored support plan is designed to meet the unique needs of each individual child. Through the ‘review’ element embedded in the approach, such plans evolve over time as their effectiveness is continuously assessed. As adjustments are deemed to be required, they are fine-tuned en route as and whenever necessary. Specialists like speech and language therapists or other professional expertise may also be brought in to provide additional support if appropriate.
Additionally, the child’s local authority may provide special funding through their own ‘Area SENCo’ (Area Special Educational Needs Coordinator). If sanctioned, this funding can be used for tailored support like additional staff, extra learning resources, specialist equipment, or bespoke activities tailored to the child’s specific needs. The Area SENCo also assists with transitioning children from early years settings to school.
Eligible children under five with SEND may be able to access additional funding to cover some of the costs associated with childcare. This is a significant topic in its own right and, as such, may indeed merit its own separate blog post. We may look at that in due course, so watch this space. However, to give you a flavour, a few examples of childcare funding available specifically to eligible children with SEND include:
As new parents, there’s an endless array of incredible moments you’ll experience as your baby grows. One of the most mesmerising changes to witness is the transformation of their eye colour. Those initial weeks of gazing into your baby’s eyes might reveal shades like brown, blue or grey, but have you ever wondered why those initial hues often defy expectations and evolve into a completely different colour? In this article, we’re going to delve into the enchanting world of baby eye colour changes to unravel the science and magic behind this captivating phenomenon.
For the purpose of this article, eye colour refers to the appearance of the iris, the coloured ring immediately surrounding the eye’s pupil. The iris is like a diaphragm that controls how much light can enter the eye at any given moment.
Generally, nature is often guided by the principle of adaptation in order to optimise survival. The evolution of eye colour is no exception. In regions with high levels of sunlight, such as near the equator, darker eye colours are more prevalent. This is due to the increased need for protection against the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays —with dark irises like brown ones having more protection than lighter irises, like blue, grey, or green. As humans migrated across different environments back in ancient times, changes in eye colour are likely to have provided advantages in terms of UV protection as part of adaptation to new habitats. The pigmentation and UV protection are accomplished through something called melanin.
While the colour journey is strongly affected by the melanin effect, genetics also play a significant role in laying the groundwork. While predicting eye colour solely on the eye colour of parents offers a fair estimation, eye colour inheritance is really a much more complex thing. At a cellular level, it involves one specific chromosome that affects iris colour and multiple genes, which control aspects like the initial amount of melanin in a newborn’s eyes and how the melanocyte cells behave in respect to further melanin production. With genes being passed to the child from both parents as well as the parents’ ancestors, the child’s final eye colour is not easy to 100% predict based purely on parental eye colour. Indeed, eye colour can sometimes ‘skip’ generations and surprise us all!
Heterochromia is a rare condition, affecting less than 1% of people, where an individual has two different coloured eyes or two different colours in one eye. It can be genetic or caused by injury, disease, or medications.
Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery is pleased to be able to include 
Our talented early-years practitioners offer high-quality teaching. This is backed up by Ofsted who, in their latest Ofsted report, said, “The quality of teaching is good. Staff are skilled and use children’s interests to challenge what they know and can do … Staff pose questions that help children to begin to problem solve.”
The setting at Leaps & Bounds is purpose-built for childcare and early years learning and development. It is extremely well-equipped, both indoors and outdoors, with a wide variety of equipment, facilities and resources to suit babies and children aged up to five. Inside, there are several light and spacious age-specific rooms, along with a separate communal room accessible to all. Outside, there are two well-designed and highly interactive play areas which offer children boundless opportunities for learning through play. 
Food, healthy snacks and drinks are included in the nursery’s fees and special diets are catered for, for example, vegetarian or vegan options. The nursery has a 5-star food hygiene rating and food is freshly prepared by an award-winning early-years catering company. Only the most fresh, locally sourced and nutritious ingredients are used.
As they grow and develop, babies and toddlers are like little sponges that soak up stimuli and information around them. As they do, their brains try to make sense of it all to give meaning and relevance to what the child sees, hears, smells, touches and tastes. When a child is in physical contact with something that stimulates their senses, the connection between cause and effect is at its most obvious. However, when it comes to physically unconnected signals like sound and less tangible things like information, making sense of them can be more difficult as there may be less context for the child to work on. It’s logical, therefore, that interactive help from parents and caregivers is going to help little ones process and put meaning to such inbound data. With help from an adult, the streams of sound and information can be given context and relevance that might otherwise not have been attainable. What’s more, a new study at the University of East Anglia has now confirmed the link between talking with infants and physical changes within their developing brains. Put simply, talking with your infant shapes their brain, quite literally. Let’s take a look at the study.
The study was undertaken by a team led by John Spencer, Professor in Psychology at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The team analysed the effect of talking on the brains of 163 infants who were enrolled in the study. Over 6,200 hours of audio were recorded via specially designed vests worn by the children, who were aged either 6 months or 30 months. After active talking with the children, their brains were scanned for approximately 40 minutes each, while asleep, using a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner.
The findings were very clear; children aged 30 months (2½ years old) who had been regularly spoken to by adults during the test period were found to have increased amounts of myelin in areas of the brain associated with language processing. Interestingly, the increase in levels of myelin was not found in other areas of the brain, suggesting it was increased purely to help the child process language. Quite a finding!
The professor talks about contingent conversations being recommended. This is rather akin to the serve-and-return approach espoused by 
Assessment, planning, actioning and reviewing are approached in a continuous, circular way, as illustrated in the accompanying diagram. In this way, any interventions designed to help a child are fully optimised and positively impactful.
After careful review, the information gleaned from the scales can be used to identify trends and any areas of concern. Findings will be used to inform the development of individualised education plans, with measurable targets being formulated, for the assessed child. If external professionals are involved in the child’s learning and development, they may also be a part of the process. An example would be when a child is supported by a Speech and Language Therapist. Parents can also be involved in any support plans via specific activities to undertake at home. These may be designed to strengthen, for example, instruction following or to bolster the child’s social skills.
Childcare funding has been all over the news in the UK this month, following the far-reaching childcare funding reforms that were announced in the Chancellor’s Spring Budget for 2023. The announcement is indeed of significant new funding, which is set to allow far more children and families to benefit from free, Government-funded childcare in the near future. Early indications are that it’s going to be a game-changer, with even younger infants gaining free access to an early years education and new parents, particularly mothers, having a much more viable route to returning to the workplace following the birth of a child. But what exactly are the changes and will they benefit your family? Today, we answer all such questions in our guide to the new childcare funding announced in the Spring Budget 2023.
Until now, only 
Parents and households will also benefit hugely from this new funding. Because it will be available far earlier in their child’s life, parents will be able to return to work sooner after children are born — not long after maternity/paternity leave ends in fact. This will make a difference to mothers in particular, as many struggle being able to afford childcare when trying to get back into the workplace after becoming a parent. And, of course, it’ll allow families to boost household income.
The proposed childcare support obtained by eligible families through Universal Credit is also very generous. Families who are eligible for this particular scheme previously had to pre-fund the childcare costs and then claim them back. This meant that families, many of whom were already struggling, had to first come up with a significant chunk of money — in advance. That cash flow challenge was a real issue for many low-income families who were otherwise eligible. It’s no wonder, therefore, that only 13% of them have been claiming this form of childcare support.
To counter this, another of the Chancellor’s announcements in the Spring Budget 2023 is to extend what’s known as ‘Wraparound Care’ for school-age children. In the new ‘Pathfinder’ approach to Wraparound Care, Government-backed childcare funding will cover childcare hours at the start and finish of the day. Parents will then be able to work for full days and not have to worry about the costs and practical challenge of childcare provision before the start and after the end of the child’s school day.
Perhaps you have heard of Tax-Free Childcare or you may have recently read news headlines about families missing out on £2,000 in free childcare each year. The two are linked and, indeed, over a million families do miss out each year, despite being eligible for this free childcare funding. So, what exactly is Tax-Free Childcare, are you eligible to receive it and, if so, how do you go about claiming it? Today, we answer all such questions in our “Quick Guide to Tax-Free Childcare”. Take a look and you may find that your family is eligible to claim as much as £2,000 towards childcare costs each year — even more if your child is disabled.
In order to be eligible to claim under the Tax-Free Childcare scheme, a few rules apply …
There are a few potential exceptions to the above rules. You may still be eligible to claim Tax-Free Childcare if, for example, you or your partner:
The Government contributes up to £2k in Tax-Free Childcare per eligible child per year, or up to £4k per year per child if they are disabled. That equates to a Government contribution of £500 or £1000 maximum per quarter respectively.
In order to claim the Tax-Free Childcare contributions, you will first need to open a Childcare Account on the Government website. You can 
How is the Childcare Provider Paid?
Today we look at the topic of baby-led weaning in a follow-up to 
While 
Except in special cases, it is normal to start any kind of weaning around the age of six months and the same is true for baby-led weaning. This is usually done by introducing a just small amount of solids per day initially. This can be done at any time of the day and does not have to follow usual feeding times. The idea of the small initial introduction is to get your infant used to taking solids in addition to their breast or formula milk. Indeed, their milk remains the most important part of their diet right up until the age of one.
Fruit and vegetables are probably the easiest finger foods to start with.
Between 6 to 7 months, additional soft foods can be given as finger foods. So, you could add small fingers of ripe avocado, ripe (i.e. soft) mango and soft melon. You can also try your infant on soft cheese fingers using mozzarella or ricotta (never before 6 months though), so long as they’re made from pasteurised milk and are not mould-ripened (like Brie), veined (like Stilton) nor made from ripened goats’ cheese. Cheeses high in salt and saturated fats should also be avoided for the young. Omelette fingers are also a good choice, so long as the eggs are fully cooked and anything added to a Spanish omelette (e.g. vegetables) is also sufficiently soft.
By the age of 10 to 12 months, your little one’s food offerings start to look much more similar to standard family meals. For example they may have progressed to cooked pasta and cut-up meatballs (or the vegetarian/vegan equivalent). They may now enjoy pitta bread pieces with hummus, perhaps cut-up cheese sandwiches (see aforementioned note about cheeses and also avoid bread that’s got added salt). Steamed/boiled potatoes or vegetables with shredded chicken, turkey or beef are another option – all, of course, suitably cooled and cut into small pieces for the child.
