Management Information Sheet

Norfolk County Council is considering changes to the way it funds nursery classes, nursery schools, childminders and other providers of early education. Our current funding arrangements are not affordable and they are outdated.

We ran a consultation period with providers for 7 weeks from 23 June 2014 to 10 August 2014. We received a very low response rate and have reopened the consultation for 2 weeks, from now until the 5 October 2014. As we really want to hear what providers think.

Whilst we have to change how we fund early education providers, we have some choice about exactly how we do this, within the amount of funding we have available. We need your help to work out exactly which changes we should make.

We want to:

• Simplify the formula that we use, by reducing the range of rates we pay to different providers.
• Target our funding to children living in more deprived parts of the county.
• Support smaller providers to be sustainable.
• Reward providers that offer a high quality service.
• Offer flexible childcare for working parents/carers.
• Make sure that the funding arrangements are affordable, within the budget we receive from the Government.

There are a range of different ways that we can change how we pay providers. We have developed three different proposals that are affordable.

We have also produced three documents that show the effect of each proposal on your funding. Please note that the figures in these documents are for example purposes only and may change. You can download these documents by following this link and scrolling to the bottom of the page: www.citizenspace.com/norfolk/consultation/early-education-funding

You will need your Department for Education Unique Reference Number (DfE URN) to see what impact each proposal would have on your funding. Each document is sorted by provider type and then numerically by the unique reference number. You can compare your indicative budget under the current funding arrangements with what your budget would be under the proposal.

We want to know what you think will help us to meet our aims set out above, and what you think of our proposals. Your answers to this survey will help us decide if we choose one of the three proposals in this document, or whether we should develop an alternative.

The deadline for completing our survey is now 5 October 2014. You can complete our survey online by following the link above and clicking then on the Online Survey link on that page.

Any changes we make to the funding arrangements will not be introduced until after 1 April 2015.