Early years funding updates
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Training/information sessions
We will be running some funding training & information sessions for providers in the summer term. Dates and times are shown below:
- Early Years Pupil Premium briefing session: Monday 22nd April 2024 from 7.00pm to 8.00pm
- Calculating funding claims for summer: Wednesday 24th April 2024 from 7.00pm to 8.00pm
- How to complete the summer headcount/amendment tasks: Friday 3rd May 2024 from 11.00am to 12.30pm and Monday 13th May 2024 from 6.30pm to 8.00pm
There is no requirement to book a place on any of these sessions, please just click on the relevant link to join.
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Working entitlement codes
If you have any working entitlement codes that haven’t been checked, please could you run a validity check as soon as possible. It’s important to remember that any codes with an ‘eligible start date’ of 1st April will not be funded in summer term and you will be required to communicate to this to parents (as applicable). For full details regarding eligibility dates for codes, please refer to our Working Entitlement Update
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Spring Amendment
If you have received a conflict or audit email, please respond as soon as possible. The spring amendment payment will be processed by 30th April. Please allow 3 working days for the payment to reach your account once processed.
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Monthly payments
As per our payment schedule, payments are processed within the first 5 working days of each month. Please allow 3 working days for the payment to reach your account.
We are often well within our deadlines when generating payments and understand how important cashflow is for businesses. The change in collecting data for summer term forecasts meant that there were queries, but payments were made on our deadline date, and this should be more manageable for future monthly payments in summer.
We will review the data collection process for autumn term and share this with providers later in the summer term and we will be collecting data on the number of hours for under 2s that will be delivered in autumn so that we can include additional funding as required.
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Planning for summer term
Summer eligible children
Newly eligible children will be entitled to a pro-rata amount of hours for the Summer funding period. A Universal 3 & 4 year old or a 2 year old funded child (targeted or working entitlement) will have a maximum of 237.5 hours available (570 annual entitlement / 12 months x 5 months).
A Working Entitlement 3 & 4 year old, will have a maximum of 475 hours available (1140 annual entitlement / 12 months x 5 months).
Providers can allocate these over the weeks they are open as long as they do not exceed 15/30 hours a week or 10 hours in any day.
570 report
Each year we produce a 570 report that lists children that have claimed funding at your setting to advise the total hours claimed in Autumn and Spring, and what hours are remaining for the Summer funding period.
This report cannot be produced until all Spring Term Amendment data and payments are processed. We hope that it will be available for Headcount week in May.
Alternatively, for children that have only attended your setting you can download your Headcount Tasks and check what termly hours have been claimed and calculate the balance remaining. For shared children, you will need to know the hours claimed with the other provider to calculate accurately.
Summer funding period – 1st April – 31st August
Adjustments will need to be made for the Summer Funding period for any bank holiday dates where the setting is closed, and the hours are not being offered elsewhere.
Headcount week
Summer Headcount week is 5th – 11th May. This does include the bank holiday Monday on 6th May but your weekly claims for the Headcount Task will assume that this was a normal full week. Please record the weekly hours as those that would usually be attended and deduct the bank holiday hours from your funding for term totals if those hours are not taken elsewhere.
Summer headcount Task Deadline is 23.59 on Sunday 19th May 2024.
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Individual Inclusion Funding
If you have a child in receipt of Individual Inclusion funding, you will need to complete a termly Review of Impact Form to be held at the setting. This maybe requested for quality and monitoring purposes.
Payments for Individual Inclusion funding are included in the termly funding claims. The funding amounts for each child are shown on your Financial Breakdown report and this will include any Individual Inclusion funding, if applicable. If funding is not shown on the Spring Headcount Financial Breakdown report, please email the helpdesk so that it can be resolved.
If a child is moving providers in the Summer Term, please email the eyef@devon.gov.uk mailbox with the details of the child, level of funding, leaving date and the details of the new provider if known.
The deadline for new applications for Autumn funding is 31st May 2024.
You will need to advise us if any children are of school age but are deferring or delaying their school start date in September so we can ensure funding continues to be available in their Early Years setting.
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Registered email address for funding purposes
If you change your email address, and this is also used for funding purposes i.e. provider portal, remittance etc. please email eyef@devon.gov.uk to advise and ask for this to be updated. If we have an incorrect email address you won’t receive conflict, audit emails, you may be missing out on important information regarding funding, and it will cause problems if you need to reset your provider portal password.
You may also need to register a new egress account for the new email in order to share sensitive and confidential information with us. Please visit Egress support for more information
Please could we also ask that funding information is shared with other staff/colleagues where relevant and appropriate.
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Polylino EAL Resources
The Early Years and Childcare service has a number of licences available for Polylino resources.
Polylino is a multilingual digital picture book service for early years providers. It provides nursery practitioners and managers with a multilingual digital library aligned with the EYFS curriculum which can be used to support language and literacy development in the nursery and at home.
More information is available on YouTube or by visiting the website.
If this is something that would support EAL children in your setting, please sign up for the free trail on the Polylino website and if you would like to apply for licences, please complete the Polylino EAL resources for early years children application form
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Communication
We understand that there were a lot of communications regarding the new entitlements in spring term and we are reviewing the best way to share information with you.
Our website has a lot of useful information, and you should familiarise yourself with this so you can find the answers to your queries easily.
We will continue to use email communication for audit and data queries as responding to the email helps us to ensure it reaches the correct team promptly. We will also use emails for updates if we feel it is required.
We will use the portal for issuing reports, sending deadline reminders and occasionally updates if appropriate. We can see that portal messages often aren’t read, and it is a concern that providers are missing important information. The Friday Digest is also a way of picking up useful updates.
To try and co-ordinate important messages we are including funding updates on this webpage. This will include everything that is current. We recommend that you ‘bookmark’ or save this webpage as a ‘favourite’ so you can easily refer to it.
We hope our communications are helpful and we look forward to supporting you through the summer funding period.