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Every term, nurseries across England go through the same process: collecting Parental Declaration forms, chasing parents who have not responded, checking eligibility codes, and entering data into their Local Authority portal. It is time-consuming, repetitive, and when something goes wrong, the financial consequences can be significant.
Claiming 15 hours instead of 30 for a child entitled to the full amount, recording a child as term-time when they attend all year round, or missing a child from the submission entirely can each cost a nursery thousands of pounds per child. Most of these errors are predictable and preventable.
Parents claiming the extended 30-hour entitlement must reconfirm their eligibility with HMRC every three months via the government’s Childcare Service. If their code lapses before the nursery submits its headcount, the Local Authority portal will typically reject the extended hours claim, and it may not be possible to backdate.
How to prevent it: check all working parent eligibility codes well before the submission deadline. For nurseries with a large cohort, checking codes one by one through the portal is impractical. Dedicated nursery funding software such as Funding Loop allows nurseries to check all codes in bulk at the start of term, flagging any that need reconfirming before it is too late.
Nurseries are required to hold a signed Parental Declaration form for every child they claim funded hours for. If a form is not returned before the headcount deadline, that child cannot be included in the submission and the nursery will not receive funding for them that term.
How to prevent it: send forms as early as possible at the start of term and make completion as simple as possible for parents. Digital forms that can be completed and signed on a mobile phone significantly improve completion rates. A real-time dashboard showing who has and has not responded makes it easy to send targeted remindersen.
The details entered on a child’s Parental Declaration form must reflect their legal name and correct date of birth. If incorrect details are entered on the form, that same incorrect information will be submitted to the Local Authority portal and may be flagged during a future Local Authority audit.
How to prevent it: ask parents to upload a birth certificate or passport when completing their Parental Declaration form, and check the uploaded document against the name and date of birth entered before approving the form and submitting the headcount.
Early Years Pupil Premium is additional funding paid to nurseries for eligible children from disadvantaged backgrounds, claimed through the Parental Declaration form. The EYPP section is easy for parents to overlook, and awareness of eligibility remains low. Any form returned without EYPP details means the nursery cannot claim that funding, even if the child clearly qualifies.
How to prevent it: use a declaration form that makes the EYPP section prominent and mandatory. The government provides guidance on eligibility criteria at gov.uk. Training staff to identify which families might qualify, and prompting them to encourage parents to complete that section, can significantly increase the amount of EYPP a nursery successfully claims.
Children can receive funded hours on a term-time basis across approximately 38 weeks, or on a stretched basis where the same annual hours are spread across more weeks at a lower weekly amount. If a child is recorded incorrectly, the weekly figure submitted to the Local Authority will be wrong, and in some cases the nursery may have inadvertently overclaimed.
How to prevent it: confirm each child’s funding arrangement at the start of the year and make sure it is accurately recorded in your nursery management system. Revisit this whenever a child’s hours or attendance pattern changes.
Most of these errors come down to the same challenge: the funding admin process relies on accurate information from multiple sources coming together correctly before a tight deadline. Building a reliable process around each step, sending Parental Declaration forms early, checking codes in advance, and tracking progress in real time, makes a meaningful difference to the accuracy of submissions
For further guidance, the government’s early years funding guidance for providers and the statutory early education and childcare guidance are both useful reference points. Plus, dedicated nursery funding software such as Funding Loop can also help nurseries manage the process from end to end.
Funding Loop automates early years funding claims by integrating nursery data with parent-provided information to create fully completed, council-ready forms.
Find out more and book at demo here.
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