The childcare offer for Ceredigion will reopen to applications in August and September.

The Welsh Government has pledged to provide 30 hours of early education and childcare to the working parents of all three and four-year-olds for 48 weeks per year - this has been available throughout Wales since April last year and around 14,600 children were taking up the childcare offer in January 2020.

This, though, had to be paused to new entrants on April 1 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and resources were focused instead on supporting the childcare needs of critical workers and vulnerable children through the Coronavirus Childcare Assistance Scheme (C-CAS).

Since June, childcare providers have been able to care for more children and increase their operations or re-open fully.

As schools prepare to reopen to all learners from September, parents and childcare providers will also want certainty about the childcare offer.

Welsh Government has been working with its partners to explore options for restarting the offer and it will open again for applications for childcare during August and September.

Parents who would have been eligible for the offer in the summer term, but who missed out on a full-term because they had not started taking up the offer before the pandemic, will be able to submit their applications from mid-August.

Applications from parents whose child becomes eligible for the offer in the autumn term will be considered from the start of September onwards. Details on the timing and how to apply will be available on local authority websites.

Parents can take up a funded place once their local authority has processed their application and they are eligible.

Local authorities will be able to draw on the additional support grant to ensure any child with additional needs can benefit from the offer in the same way as other children. These are the same arrangements, which were in place before the pandemic.

Local authorities will be working hard to ensure children can access the offer as soon as possible. They will inevitably be dealing with a large number of applications over a short period of time and we know that some families’ circumstances will have changed significantly over the past few months. It may take longer to approve applications than normal in some areas.