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2023-08-31-accounts

DUXFORD PRESCHOOL

REPORT AND ACCOUNTS FOR THE PERIOD ENDED 31[ST] AUGUST 2023

Principal Address:

c/o Duxford Primary School St John’s Street Duxford CB22 4RA

Independent Examiner: Rebecca Coles Newton Hall, Town Street, Newton, Cambridge, CB22 7ZE

A charitable incorporated organisation registered in England and Wales Registered Charity no: 1165461 OFSTED Unique Reference no: EY50063

Trustees' Annual Report for theperiod
**From ** Period start date To Period end date
01 09 2022 31 08 2023

Section A Reference and administration details

Charity name Duxford Preschool

Other names charity is known by

Registered charity number (if any) 1165461

Charity's principal address Sunshine Room Duxford C of E Community Primary School St. Johns Street Duxford, Cambridge Postcode CB22 4RA

Names of the charity trustees who manage the charity

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2
3
4
5
6
7
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9		 Trustee name Office (if any) Dates acted if not for whole
year		 Name of person (or body)
entitled to appoint trustee
(ifany)
Stephen Burgess Chair 01.10.16 to present day
Natalie Hanlon Treasurer 07.03.19 to present day
Sally Hodges Trustee 30.09.19 to 04.07.2023
Catherine Dunn Trustee 21.01.22 to present day
Karla Marwood Trustee 04.07.2023 to present day
Nicolas Seal Trustee 04.07.2023 to 06.10.2023
Alice Thompson Trustee 04.07.2023 to present day
Charlotte Tomlinson Trustee 04.07.2023 to present day
Steve Scott Trustee 04.07.2023 to 11.02.2024

Names of the trustees for the charity, if any, (for example, any custodian trustees)

Name Dates acted if not for whole year

Names and addresses of advisers (Optional information)

Names and addresses of advisers (Optional information) Names and addresses of advisers (Optional information) Names and addresses of advisers (Optional information)
Type of adviser Name
Address
Local Authority
Early Years
Advisor		 Sienna Carter Cambridge County Council

Name of chief executive or names of senior staff members (Optional information)

Preschool Manager: Katie Draper

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Section B Structure, governance and management

Description of the charity’s trusts

Type of governing document

Pre-School Learning Alliance Model CIO Constitution for Childcare Providers 2013, adopted on 12[th] January 2016

How the charity is constituted

[Trust ]

Trustee selection methods

[Appointed by the current members of the Committee (Trustees) at the AGM ]

Additional governance issues (Optional information)

You may choose to include additional information, where relevant, about:

Duxford Preschool is a registered charity that is run by a committee, primarily consisting of parents and carers of children in the setting. It is run as a Charitable Incorporated Organization (CIO). Our constitution requires a minimum of 3 Trustees, who have overall legal responsibility for the preschool.

The AGM often sees committee members stepping down; to ensure consistency for the Preschool, we have implemented a model which sees the majority of the financial and strategic management carried out by the Preschool Management team, with the Committee offering oversight and governance. The Committee therefore meets once a term (or more frequently as required) to discuss any issues, are in regular email contact and work collaboratively with the Preschool Management team. Trustees complete DBS checks in line with statutory requirements and induction and training take place as part of our regular meetings.

The Preschool management structure consists of one Manager, two Deputy Managers, and a Business Manager. The Preschool works regularly with many Cambridge County Council professionals, namely an Early Years Inclusion Advisor and the Local Inclusion Forum Team (consisting of Specialist Teachers, Health Visitors and Social Services representatives). We also attend Early Years Network and Briefing Sessions hosted by the Local Authority. We are additionally supported by an Early Years Improvement Advisor.

Our Preschool is on the site of the Duxford C of E Community Primary School and, although we are a separate body, we regularly meet with the Early Years team at the school to share ideas.

Trustees give their time for free and receive no financial benefit. We are a CIO to reduce the financial liability and risk to trustees. The Preschool policies and procedures are regularly reviewed and amended to reflect changes in best practice as well as statutory guidance. The environment is checked daily for H&S risk and we use risk assessments in relation to trips, activities, and equipment.

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Section C Objectives and activities

Summary of the objects of the
charity set out in its
governing document
Summary of the main
activities undertaken for the
public benefit in relation to
these objects (include within
this section the statutory
declaration that trustees have
had regard to the guidance
issued by the Charity
Commission on public
benefit)		 The charity works for the public benefit having as its objects the development
and education of children and young people in particular by:
(1) promoting their care and safety;
(2) promoting their education and promoting parental involvement;
(3) promoting their health and wellbeing;
(4) providing services to support them and their families and carers;
(5) providing services to individuals holding membership of the CIO; and
(6) furthering the aims of the Pre-school Learning Alliance.
In all of our work we (the trustees) have regard to the guidance issued by the
Charity Commission on public benefit.
Our main activity is to deliver, within our fully inclusive setting for 2 ¼ –5-year
olds, the Early Year Foundation Stage. In order to do this, we employ childcare
managers and practitioners who undertake joint daily planning of activities to
meet the needs and interests of the children attending our setting. We deploy a
key person approach to ensure that the progress and well-being of all individual
children is constantly monitored and feeds into future planning.
We ensure that our staff are well trained and hence able to successfully meet
the needs of the children in our care. We promote the importance of the learning
environment and endeavour to make this as stimulating as possible. We listen to
the views of children, parents and staff and use this feedback to inform our
improvement work. We accurately assess our children and provide this
information to Cambridge County Council as requested.
We develop positive relationships with parents and carers and invite them into
our setting as observers or helpers. We value all children as individuals and
celebrate Britain’s diversity of culture of ethnicity. We help the children in our
care to be happy and healthy.
We have policies and procedures in place for all aspects of safeguarding, child
protection and health and safety, and we use staff training days and meetings to
ensure all staff are fluent in these. We follow the recommendations offered by
our Cambridge County Council improvement advisor and the guidance available
from the Early Years Alliance (formally the Preschool Learning Alliance).

Additional details of objectives and activities (Optional information)

You may choose to include further statements, where relevant, about:

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Section D Achievements and performance

Summary of the main achievements of the charity during the year

Overview

During the 2022-2023 period, the Preschool continued to open for 38 weeks of the year, offering up-to 30 hours of early years education and care to children 2 ¼ to 5 years old. We have continued to offer 15/30 hours per week free of charge to children from the term after they turn 3, as well as those children who qualify as a Funded Two, as part of the central government’s Early Years Funding scheme. In addition, we offer private places to those families who do not yet qualify for funding. We started the year at 76% capacity (2022: 67%), which by the summer term had increased to 97% occupancy (2022: 90%), an excellent improvement year on year. Of the 36 children on roll, 18 children left to move onto reception at the end of the Summer Term with 18 children remaining for the Autumn Term 2023. Our wonderful staff have continued to provide the children with first class support and early years education. We continued to see how children born during the Covid-19 pandemic have been impacted by the lockdowns and changes in behaviour. There has been significant impact on the children’s PSED skills (physical, social and emotional development) as well as Speech and Language, and the staff have focused extensively on supporting their friendships and social interactions and engaging the support of Speech and Language Therapists where needed. They have offered a wide variety of opportunities to extend their learning through open—ended activities and encouraged them to become curious and independent learners. Ongoing effort is made each year to improve both the level of care provided to the children and the business practices employed by the Preschool. The senior management team continually seek to further their knowledge through involvement in groups and forums, and undertake additional CPL regularly. In addition to listening to staff and Committee members, the families are invited to give feedback using the annual questionnaire, the result of which are incorporated into practice. This year, the AGM was held during the Summer Term and we were delighted to welcome 5 new Trustees to the Management Committee. After two years of planning, we were very excited when work finally began on the construction of the new Preschool premises in September 2022. Work progressed quickly and there was a significant amount of work involved in liaising with the site manager to keep everything on track and to the desired specification. Almost 3 years to the day of the fire, we were handed the keys to our purpose built Preschool and the work began to get everything moved from the mobile unit and set up over the holidays ready for the new term in September.

Staffing

The current senior management team comprises the Manager, two Deputies and the Business Manager. There are also 3 staff members working as Preschool Practitioners, which brings the total number of staff to 7.

We continue to strongly believe in the continuing professional development of our Staff and provided considerable opportunities for them to refresh their knowledge and qualifications in: • Basic Child Protection including Prevent and FGM • Food Hygiene L2

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Section D Achievements and erformance p

The management team also attend termly Leadership & Governance Briefings, and Early Years Foundation Forums provided by the Local Authority.

Fees

We made a small increase to our fee rate during the year (£6.50 for 2-year-olds and £6.00 for 3/4-year-olds) and also received a small increase in our rate of funding from the Local Authority. For 3 and 4 year olds this increased to £4.63 from £4.37, and the 2-year rate increased to £6.12 from £5.78.

Fundraising

A small committee for the majority of the year has meant that there has not been a focus on fundraising, but the Preschool staff attended the village “DuxFest” event in July, offering facepainting, glitter tattoos and a teddie tombola, making £238.18 after expenses. Together with commission from Preschool photographs (£80.48), the sale of unwanted Preschool equipment (£177), and cashback from Amazon Smile (£36.03), we raised a net total of £531.69.

Future

We currently have a reasonable number of children on the waiting list to join the Preschool in during the 23-24 academic year which is a great position to be in. However, our rate of growth could be limited if we’re unable to recruit staff as we continue to have very little interest from suitable candidates for Practitioner Roles that have been advertised. This reflects other settings’ experiences up and down the country, and recruitment is likely to be our biggest challenge during the coming academic year, especially following the announcement in March 2023 by the Government that it would be expanding the roll out of the funding scheme to offer funded hours to the children of families where both parents are working from 9 months old. It is anticipated that this will result in a surge of applications from families of children aged 2 years. Increasing the number of children in this age bracket presents a number of challenges: children require far more support especially with intimate care and their PSED which in turn affects staff deployment. Additionally, the child:staff ratio is reduced to 4:1 which results in us being able to offer fewer places for the same number of staff. If we are unable to increase our staffing, then we will have difficultly in offering places to families on our waiting list and will be unable to support our local community with their childcare needs.

Section E Financial review

Brief statement of the There has been no change to the Preschool’s Reserves Policy which aims to charity’s policy on reserves keep reserves of approximately £33,000; a contingency sum which provides for 1 terms expenditure and redundancy obligations.

Accumulated funds now exceed the Early Years Alliance recommendation to hold 3 months’ running costs in reserve. Ordinarily we would take measures to reduce these funds by re-investing any surplus back into the charity to further its aims (i.e. to benefit the children). However, we are aware that the Preschool will need to purchase large play equipment for the outside area of the new Preschool and will retain these funds for this purpose.

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Details of any funds materially in deficit

None.

Further financial review details (Optional information)

You may choose to include additional information, where relevant about:

We ended the 2022-2023 year with an unrestricted loss of £32,059.97. The balance of reserves brought forward on 01/09/22 was £102,298.82 and the balance carried forward has therefore been increased to £70,238.85 as of 31/08/23.

Over the period, income totalled £115,666.13 (2022: £119,735.65), an decrease of £4,069.52. It should be noted however, that the 2022 financial year included an insurance claim payout of £12,515.45, so adjusting for this non-recurring income, there would have been a year-on year increase of £8,445.94 in income from operating activities.

The Charity’s principle source of income comes from the local authority for the provision of 15 or 30 hours of funded education for eligible children. This ‘early years funding’ income totalled £84,117.21 (2022: £81,198.72), representing 72.7% of our total income. Fees paid for additional sessions and for non— funded places totalled £18,445.04 (2022: £20,430.96) representing 15.6% of income. The Fair Funding and Consumable supplement raised a further £2,255.71 (2022: £4,357.54) which was a significant decrease from the previous year. The remaining 9.4% of income of was from a mixture of fundraising, donations, miscellaneous fees and income specifically related to supporting Ukrainian Refugees.

Over the same period, expenditure totalled £147,726.10 (2022: £91,818.57). This was expected and in accordance with the Trustees’ decision to invest in the design and installation of an amazing garden space in the new premises, £45,000 of the £48,922 cost was paid in this financial year. Adjusting for this one off item, expenditure relating to ongoing operations for the period was £102,276.10. Our main expenditure continues to be our Staffing Costs, which at £83,489.09 (2022: £77,618.98) accounted for 81.27% of our adjusted expenditure (56.5% of all costs). Our next largest expenditure was rent, totalling £8,070.00 (2022: £5,671.20) which is 7.9% of our adjusted costs, with all additional running expenses of the preschool accounting for the remaining 10.9% (£11,167.01).

Section F Other optional information

Section G Declaration

The trustees declare that they have approved the trustees’ report above.

Signed on behalf of the charity’s trustees:

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Signature(s)

Full name(s) Natalie Hanlon

Position (e.g. Secretary, Chair, etc)[Treasurer for the period ]

Date 15[th] May 2024

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Section A Independent Examiner’s Report

Report to the trustees/ Charity Name Duxford Preschool members of On accounts for the year 31 August 2023 ended Set out on pages 1 to 12 (remember to include the page numbers of additional sheets)

I report to the trustees on my examination of the accounts of the above charity (“the Trust”) for the year ended 31 / 08 / 2023 .

Responsibilities and As the charity trustees of the Trust, you are responsible for the preparation basis of report of the accounts in accordance with the requirements of the Charities Act 2011 (“the Act”).

I report in respect of my examination of the Trust’s accounts carried out under section 145 of the 2011 Act and in carrying out my examination, I have followed the applicable Directions given by the Charity Commission under section 145(5)(b) of the Act.

Independent I have completed my examination. I confirm that no material matters have examiner's statement come to my attention (other than that disclosed below *) in connection with the examination which gives me cause to believe that in, any material respect:

I have no concerns and have come across no other matters in connection with the examination to which attention should be drawn in order to enable a proper understanding of the accounts to be reached.

Signed: Name: Rebecca Coles FCCA Relevant professional ACCA qualification(s) or body (if any): Address: Newton Hall, Town Street Newton, Cambridge CB22 7ZE

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Section B Disclosure

Only complete if the examiner needs to highlight matters of concern (see CC32, Independent examination of charity accounts: directions and guidance for examiners).

Give here brief details of n/a any items that the examiner wishes to disclose .

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DUXFORD PRESCHOOL REGISTERED CHARITY NO 1165461 RECIEPTS AND PAYMENTS FOR THE YEAR TO 31 AUGUST 2023

Notes
Unrestricted
£
Income
Early Years Funding
84,117
Invoiced Fees
18,445
Fair Funding & Consumables Fee
2,256
Registration Fee
280
DAF & SENIF
-
Ukraine Funding
5,950
Uniform Sales
303
Fundraising
658
Grants
-
Donations
3,518
Gift Aid
-
Special Events
140
COVID-19 SSP
-
Insurance Claim Pay-out
-		 Restricted
Total 2023
£
£
-
84,117
-
18,445
-
2,256
-
280
-
-
-
5,950
-
303
-
658
-
-
-
3,518
-
-
-
140
-
-
-
-		 Total 2022
£
81,199
20,431
4,358
460
-
-
90
313
-
177
-
-
193
12,515
Total Income
115,666		 -
115,666		 119,736
Less Operating Expenses
Wages Pensions PAYE
83,489
Rent
3
8,070
Telephone & Internet
371
Website & Email
250
Toys & Resources
1,038
Furniture & Equipment
2,297
Art & Craft Consumable
416
Snacks
643
Stationery & Postage
458
Health & Hygiene Equipment
373
Recruitment
-
Repairs & Maintenance
146
End of Term Gifts
448
Special Events
1,259
Marketing & Advertising
-
Insurance
1,047
Professional Fees
350
DBS Checks
254
Subscriptions
225
Uniform & Clothing
562
Payroll & Accountancy Services
428
Staff Training
474
Fundraising Expenses
127
Bank Charges
-
Fire Refurbishment Expenses
4
45,000		 -
83,489
-
8,070
-
371
-
250
-
1,038
-
2,297
-
416
-
643
-
458
-
373
-
-
-
146
-
448
-
1,259
-
-
-
1,047
-
350
-
254
-
225
-
562
-
428
-
474
-
127
-
-
-
45,000
-
147,726
(32,060)
-
102,299
-
70,239
77,619
5,671
401
174
1,160
745
317
590
399
383
72
152
437
585
-
1,016
465
156
75
93
401
845
62
1
-
Total Operating Expenses
147,726		 91,819
Surplus/Deficit
(32,060)		 27,917
Cash balances b/f
102,299		 74,382
Balances c/f
70,239		 102,299

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DUXFORD PRESCHOOL REGISTERED CHARITY NO 1165461 STATEMENT OF ASSETS AND LIABILITIES AS AT 31 AUGUST 2023

Notes
RESERVES
Balance b/f
Excess income over expenditure
Total reserves
CASH FUNDS
Current Banking Account
Savings Account
Total cash funds
LIABILITIES
Rent
3
Independent Examination
Garden Design and Installation
4
Early Years Funding for 2023-2024
5
Total liabilities
FUNDS OF THE CHARITY
Restricted funds
Unrestricted funds
Total charity funds		 2023
£
102,299
(32,060)
70,239
70,239
-
70,239
-
180
3,388
16,540
20,108
-
70,239
70,239		 2022
£
74,382
27,819
102,299
102,299
-
102,299
2,034
180
13,244
15,548
-
102,229
102,229

Notes to the accounts for the year ended 31[st] August 2023.

1 ACCOUNTING POLICIES

Basis of Accounting

The financial statements have been prepared on the receipts and payments basis.

Income

All income is included at the time of receipt.

Expenses

All expenditure is accounted for at the time of payment.

2 EQUIPMENT

All equipment purchased by the charity is included under these headings as an expense. No items have been capitalised.

3 RENT

£2,034 of rent for the prior financial year was paid during this period.

4 FIRE REFURBISHMENT

A final balance of £3,388.01 remains due in respect of the garden design and installation works.

5 EARLY YEARS FUNDING

£16,539.78 of Early Years Funding relating to Autumn Term 2023 was received on 30[th] August 2023.

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