Issue 23 - September 2024
Key Dates
Autumn term funding covers the period 1st September - 31st December (14 weeks funding)
- Actual Task Portal Opening - 9th September
- Deadline for Portal Submissions - 27th September
- 2nd Payment - 15th November
- Amendment Task Portal Opening - 5th - 11th November
- Final Reconciled Payment - 13th December
Providers are reminded that the Actual headcount task is compulsory for all providers wishing to claim FEL or WPE in a funding period, failure to complete this task may result in you being overpaid. Please refer to the following website page that explains the required data.
The second stage of the Expansion to Early Years Childcare has now started. Children from working families can claim up to 15 hours per week from the term after they turn 9 months old.
All of the existing rules for Working Parent Entitlement apply, including the checks that providers must do to ensure that a child is entitled to claim.
Remember: parents must apply and be approved the term before they want to claim in. For Autumn 2024, this means the parent must have applied to HMRC and have been approved by 31/08/2024 and the child must also be at least 9 months old by this date.
Although Working Parent Entitlement has been in place since September 2017, we still have cases each term of providers not checking the entitlement information correctly and giving children places, and losing out as they cannot claim funding and cannot retrospectively charge parents. If in doubt, refer to the Code of Practice and the Working Parent Entitlement User Guide. Both of these documents can be found online.
Any FEL providers who face financial worries that lead to cash flow problems in between their termly FEL payments can request an advance payment of their next scheduled headcount by completing the Advanced - Missed Payment Request Form available online under Supporting Information on the Funded Early Learning information for Providers council web page. Providers are required to answer a number of questions and submit additional mandatory evidence to support any advance payment request.
Please be aware that this form can also be used if you have missed one of your headcount submissions and are unable to wait to correct this at the following task.
For any queries regarding advanced/missed payment requests please contact the Funding Team.
With the implementation of the recent childcare reforms around expanded entitlement for working parents in younger age groups and wraparound care in the primary age range, the Performance and Analysis Service (PAS) are needing to collect additional information from providers in order to gain a better understanding of the total supply and demand for places, and to allow the Early Years Planning team to work with the sector in order to ensure sufficiency of places.
In order to do this, we will be activating the Self-update portal as part of the Provider Portal used to collect Early Years Census information and asking providers to complete this on a termly basis. The information asked for will NOT be at child level and will be counts of:
- Number of staff working with children under 5
- Private hourly rates for age groups served
- Current total capacity (including paid for places), number of vacancies and number on waiting list
The Self-update portal will be open on a permanent basis and will not be tied to Census opening and closing periods.
Further information of implementation during the Autumn term will be forthcoming and guidance notes will be made available.
The information collected is important to the LA’s planning process which is considered when planning any interventions within the childcare market. As data profiles are developed this information will be made available to childcare providers, designed to help with your own business planning.
Membership - September 2024
The Early Years Working Group is a sub-group of the Sheffield Education Funding Forum. The role of the Group is to offer advice, experience, information and recommendations to the Sheffield Education Funding Forum and consider matters related to the funding of childcare providers in Sheffield delivering Funded Early Learning (FEL).
Membership of the group is representative of the diverse types of early year’s provision across the city. The group meets 2-3 times per year. Current Early Years Working Group representatives are:
- Julia Delaney - Tapton School Academy Trust
- Leanne Moore - Rainbow Forge Primary School
- Nancy Farrow - Grace Owen Nursery School
- Karen Simpkin - Sunflower Children's Centre (School Forum Early Years Representative)
- Sally Pearse - Darnall Community Nursery
- Susan Casey - Norton Community School
- Carlette Sarayreh - Early Years Care and Education
- Claire Carroll - Sheffield Hallam University
- Nola Jackson-Boot - Hydra Tots Private Day Nursery
- Christine Plant - Tiddlywinks
- Laura Gregory - The Nature Box Forest School
- Helen Dyball - Childminder
To find out more about the Sheffield Education Funding Forum please visit our website: Sheffield Education Funding Forum | Sheffield City Council
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Save Not Submit
We are experiencing an increasing number of providers making multiple submissions of their census return, some in excess of 8 or 9 times.
When entering data onto your headcount task, please remember to save changes as you make amendments or add new children, rather than pressing submit after every change.
Multiple task submissions from Providers mean additional levels of unnecessary data checking for us, taking up valuable officer time. For context - processing just the duplicate records submitted multiple times during the Autumn Forecast task (2361 children) caused an additional 4722 minutes or 3.27 days of additional unnecessary extra work.
Any additional time spent on clearing duplicate records could result in a delay to your FEL payments.
You can save changes each time you enter/amend details on the headcount and then make one final submission when you are happy that all the data is entered correctly.
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Under Section 3.2 of the Code of Practice for Providers Delivery of Funded Early Learning, a requirement of providers is that they must log on to the Sheffield Directory at least once per term to ensure their listed information is up to date and accurate.
The Local Authority has given service providers ownership and control of details they wish to share with the public from the beginning. So new childcare providers need to create their own listing on the Sheffield Directory about their provision’s offer, for families who wish to search for information this way. The Code of Practice will be amended to outline this new requirement of childcare providers in Sheffield.
There is an instruction video available - The Sheffield Directory (youtube.com) -which is designed to help providers add a new listing onto the website.
Any queries concerning childcare provider listings on the Sheffield Directory can be sent to the Childcare Planning team.
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Late Submission of Portal Tasks
Please note the dates for the headcount are published at the beginning of the financial year to support your business planning in the forthcoming year.
With ever decreasing resources SCC is not in a position to accept submissions outside of the planned cycle of data collections and associated data processing for payments.
We strongly advise providers to have more than one staff member signed up to use the portal where possible. This will negate the commonly reported issue of the relevant staff being off absent or on holiday when the headcount submission is due.
Both the headcount timetable for the financial year and the Provider Portal Access Request form can be found online.
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Contact Us......
Telephone support is available Monday to Friday between the hours of 10am and 4pm on our usual helpdesk number - 0114 273 6423
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During peak periods of processing the FEL funding claims for payment, the team’s telephones will be put on voicemail. Please leave your name and number and we will endeavour to get back to you within 3 working days.
For all non-urgent enquiries please continue to contact us via our usual email address; EYFEL.Census@sheffield.gov.uk and we will endeavour to get back to you within 3 working days.
Alternatively you can go to the SCC web page; Funded Early Learning information for providers , which has a wealth of information that could help you.
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