30 Hours nursery funding system goes live across Birmingham
October 2017 | News
Birmingham City Council has gone live with the latest version of the Sentinel Nursery Education Funding (NEF) portal which covers extended nursery funding.
Serving more than 750 early years settings across the city, the portal enables real-time checks to be made against the Department for Education's online Eligibility Checking System (ECS).
Settings will get immediate responses to the application requests being made by parents for three and four-year-old children to cover the new 30 Hours funding initiative.
In addition, parents themselves can check the funding eligibility of their two-year-old children using the same real-time web services.
Sentinel Partners director, Graham McCusker, said: "Our solution means that local authorities as large as Birmingham can make light work of the high volume of child records and eligibility checks that need to be processed.
"Its wide-ranging functionality also means that once children are being funded, the portal will automatically check for their continuing eligibility as they approach the end of the funding period."
