If you are in preschool or you are in receipt of 2 year old funding you would have been given a form to claim funding this year. Please can you complete these and bring them back into the nursery as soon as you can. The closing date for the funding is the 10th of May and it would be a shame if we missed out on funding because these forms are not returned.
The reason why these form are so important is we have to get a signature from you when we claim the funding to allow us to apply for it on your behalf. The form changed this year from April to include a space for your national insurance number, I am sure you all wonder why we are asking this. Well with this number we are able to get the council to check to see if we are entitled to extra money called Early Years Pupil Premium. This can be as much as £300 per year per eligible child. Now this does not effect any form of benefits that you may already receive, its additional to everything.
The setting will get allocated the amount due to them in the next headcount which is on the 10th May hence why this is an important date. This money must be spent on the children, it cannot become part of any profits that the nursery may make and it must all be accountable to Medway Council and Ofsted. So please please please bring back the form for us so we can check whether we are entitled to this additional funding.
So what are we looking at doing to improve the setting for the children in receipt of EYPP, at the moment we have two focus areas, the garden and Speech and language. Many children develop and learn at a greater rate in the outdoor environment and we are looking at making the outside area useable all year round for all sorts of activities.This learning should be seen in the evidence that we send home in the learning stories and the trackers that the office do. Once we have our first set of useable data since the change of use for the garden this will be published to all parents to allow you to see the impact of this change. With speech and language we will be starting with training the staff members in the unit, once training has been received by the staff members we will be looking at starting different programmes like book start corner and sing and sign along. These are different programmes that the local sure start centre that offer.
We are very excited to start this with the children and parents. As we understand the importance of the home environment in young children’s lives, children who attend nursery for just their funded hour spend as little as 6.5% of their week in a setting. So we would be delighted to see parents and carers come along, implement some of the things we do at nursery at home. We think you do a great job already we just want to help you along with different ideas and skills.
Thank you for reading all my waffle today, its a bit heavy for a Monday morning but i do feel that if i get it out there today, we can be ready and set for when everyone comes back.
