Fees
When you register your child for a place with us, we ask for a fee of £30.00 to cover our administration costs. This is refundable if we are unable to offer you a place.
Session Fees
Children eligible for funding - All three and four year olds are entitled to 15 hours (5 sessions x 3 hours) of FREE early education, beginning the term after their 3rd birthday. This is funded by Wokingham Borough Council, and you can find more details on their web site here.
Children not eligible for funding - Children under the age of three are not eligible for funding, and therefore we charge the full amount of £11.50 per session.
Children eligible for funding but where they attend another pre-school or nursery - Children may take sessions at a combination of pre-schools or nurseries, however, for any session where we do not receive funding we charge the full amount of £11.50 per session.
Changes To Session Fees From September 2010
Wokingham Borough is moving to from three to two intakes a year for primary schools, starting in September 2010. This means that many children will leave Chestnuts for primary school at a younger age, and in order to maintain our occupancy levels we will need to accept children at a younger age too.
We are committed to keeping fees to the minimum level possible, but with the increase in the numbers of younger children our costs will increase significantly - in the main because staff to children ratios need to be higher when there are more under 3s in a session. Wokingham Borough Council currently recommends a fee of £4.85 per hour (£14.55 per session) for under 3s, whereas at present Chestnuts charge only £3.83 per hour (£11.50 per session).
In light of these changes it is no longer viable to maintain our current fees for under 3s. We therefore plan to increase our fees for under 3s to £13.00 per session from September 2010. At present we believe it is financially viable, due to our active fundraising and very careful management of costs, to maintain the session fee at this level, but of course this will remain under review.
Other Fees
Lunch club - For children who stay for lunch club on Mondays & Thursdays, we charge £2.50
Late collection - Unless previously agreed, we will charge a late collection fee of £10.00 for children collected more than 10 minutes after the end of any session.
Referred or unpaid cheques - We charge an administration fee of £25.00 for each unpaid cheque returned by the bank.