Management Queries: Should nurseries charge for reports requested by outside agencies?

Q. I’m getting increasingly more requests from outside agencies for reports on children. Often they are very detailed and say they are needed as soon as possible. I want to support children and share information but we’re a small staff team and I’m struggling to find the time to complete these forms and questionnaires. How do others manage this? I’ve heard that some settings have started to charge, but how does that work?

Robert Fox, owner and manager, Happy Bunnies Nursery School

‘I’m the SENDCO at our nursery. I think it would be really helpful if, rather than charging for this, nurseries received more support from professionals in completing forms. Although there needs to be a balance. From a business perspective, getting someone else from outside to come into the setting and do the work for you would be a quick fix. But only the practitioner really knows the child and can write that report from the heart.

‘Professionals could help save time in other ways too. For example, we struggle to navigate our local authority’s online system for uploading documents and this slows us down. Being short-staffed also prevents us from completing documents.

‘One tip I would give is to consider using free artificial intelligence programmes to write reports. I use ChatGPT to write in note form, and it formulates these into paragraphs and checks the grammar, which saves me time. Or, the Famly app has just introduced Sidekick, which is a writing assistant that can help you get newsletters done at the end of the week, then free up your time for report writing.’

Rachel Martin, manager, Holbourn House Day Nursery

‘Our setting accommodates up to 50 children a day with 22 staff. We have not got to the point where we need to start charging for filling in forms from agencies, such as speech and language therapy. I have heard mutterings about this idea, but I do not know any settings doing this. I’m not sure how it would work – how could we charge the NHS, for example?

‘Of course we are a profit-making business. But children are at the centre of what we do. I do not see accepting a child as an opportunity to make profit. A child with additional needs should have exactly the same access to early education as any child.

‘But I do understand completing these forms can be really challenging, especially in smaller settings where the manager is the special educational needs and disability co-ordinator (SENDCO) and in-ratio. When will they find the time?

‘My SENDCO and deputy both have a full day each in the office weekly to complete paperwork. One report can take three or four hours. However, once they have done one, they use that to write others more quickly – there is a lot of cutting and pasting.

‘One way I try to access extra finance to write reports is through Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) funding. At the start of agreeing the plan, if there is a need for liaising between agencies, I include time for this in the plan, incorporating report writing.

‘I would recommend speaking to your local authority to see if extra funding is available.’

Suzanne Morton, owner and SENDCO, Little Jems Nursery

‘I do not know any settings charging for reports. But I often wonder why we have to pay specialists to do reports for us. We have to pay an educational psychologist to do a report for a child’s EHCP application. By the time the child receives their plan, which can take 20 weeks, they have usually left for school. Our setting does not see any of the benefit of the funding.

‘As early years professionals, our expertise should be recognised and we should be able to do these reports in-house. Psychologists come into the setting for one day, while we know the children inside out. If we could keep the £600-£800 it costs us to pay for this report, we could put that towards staffing.

‘I have a team of seven. I’m the SENDCO and do the majority of the report writing at home. My manager and deputy are on-rota, so it is hard for them to help. The two-year-olds offer that started in April has put more pressure on us. We are meeting the demand for reports with great difficulty.

‘One way I’ve reduced the time to complete reports is I refuse to meet agencies’ format. I give them a child’s support plan we have already written, rather than spending extra time filling in their specific form. I tell them, my staff physically do not have the time to do it.

‘If we did try to charge, ultimately parents would pick up the bill. This would not be fair. Nor is it fair to spread the costs across our daily charge for all parents. But somehow staff time has to be paid for.’