Grants available for OSCAR providers

You may be able to get a grant to help cover some of your operating costs if:

• you're an approved OSCAR provider
• your programme operates 5 days a week
• you get income from parent fees or contributions
• your programme is listed in the MSD Family Services Directory

Your programme also needs to meet the operating hours and attendance requirements.

	Minimum weekly number of hours	Minimum daily average attendees
Before-school	5	5
After-school	10	10
Holiday programmes*	30	10

*Holiday programmes must be run for at least 4 weeks a year, with at least 1 of those weeks in each school holiday period.

Attendance

The average attendance is worked out by taking the total number of children who actually attended each day and dividing this by the number of days the programme operated for the period.

What counts as attendance

Attendance includes:

• children actually at the programme
• public holidays where the child would have otherwise attended on that day
• children temporarily away for any reason, but due back within 3 weeks
• children temporarily away because of ill health for up to 6 weeks, who have either provided a medical certificate, or receive Child Disability Allowance or Group Special Education funding

How much you get depends on the number of children you have attending your programme.

You may be eligible for a top up grant if your programmes operate in a low socio-economic or isolated area, have fluctuating attendance due to seasonal work or needing to relocate as a result of a civil defence emergency.

Applications for this grant closed on 30 September 2019.

We'll update this page with details of when and how to apply when applications are open.

The panel will consider all applications by Wednesday 14 October 2020, and we’ll let you now the outcome by Wednesday 21 October 2020.

We’ll send contracts by 30 November 2020. We’ll pay the grants from 1 November 2020, and they will be backdated to 1 July 2020. Please note that funding will be allocated according to funding availability.