Fees

To view our current fee sheet please download it below.

The Gower School Nursery Fees 2025

The Gower School Primary Fees 2025

Government’s “free 30 hours” scheme

From September 2025 the government will offer free nursery places for 30 hours a week to children over 9 months old whose parents are financially eligible (see below for eligibility requirements). We will participate in this scheme from its start.

The government’s funding is at a significantly lower level than our normal fees, and therefore provides only essential core nursery care. The Gower School’s vision and commitment has always been to go far beyond this, to provide a top-quality broad education, with care which supports the full development of each child. This includes a Montessori curriculum taught by qualified Montessori practitioners, and a full programme of additional activities including sport, languages, music, and dance, all taught by specialist teachers. It also includes high-quality meals and snacks prepared on site, external trips and real nappies. These all play a central role in helping our children to grow and develop into successful independent learners. We do not want to see some of our children benefitting from this broad range of development experiences and others not, and we therefore strongly encourage all children to participate with their friends in the full life of their room. Parents of children who do not opt in to this will need to make arrangements to take their child off site for meals and to provide snacks, and they will not be able to participate in the essential early years activities listed above, as they are not funded by the government.

The government offers funding to eligible families for 1140 hours per year, which it describes as 30 hours per week for 38 weeks a year. The Gower School is not a term-time only nursery but is open for 48 weeks a year. The government’s 1140 hours per year therefore equates to 23.75 hours for each of the 48 weeks a year that we are open, or 4.75 hours per day.

 We offer places completely funded by the government’s scheme, from 12.15pm to 5pm each day. The optional additional cost of our full programme is £10 per day for children aged under 2, and £20 per day for children over 2. Children are of course able to combine this offer with a paid place for other hours. Full details of our fees are set out on the links above.

The government’s eligibility rules for all nurseries are that both parents must each be earning more than £167 per week, and less than £100,000 per year (one parent either below the minimum or above the maximum makes the family ineligible). Parents can assess their eligibility for funding and the application process by visiting the  Government Childcare Choices website.

Important advice: in order to process applications by the strict government deadlines, applications should be made on the government website and the child’s code sent to our office by 31 July, 30 November and 31 March, for the following term (and must be renewed each term). The government offer no flexibility on this and if a deadline is missed, parents will need to wait until the next deadline to receive government funding.

For children aged over 3 years, the government funds 15 hours to all children, irrespective of family income. Children whose parents meet the financial eligibility criteria may also benefit from the additional 11.875 hours (“15 hours”) per week.