Free bookings that aren't council funded#180

Hi, we are going to have to run 2 parallel systems because we offer HAF places and other free places funded by other sources, but the ability to do this doesn’t exist within the system. Our council are requiring us to use Eequ, this is confusing for parents and lots of admin for us. We need a ticket that is free but not HAF funded.

Hello Helen
You can achieve this by Duplicating your council listing And creating a second listing that is private and contains your free other funded tickets.
The HAf listing contains an important set of data that must be sent in its entirety to the council and Then transformed into many different metrics and DFE reporting.
If you do not want your bookers to see two different listings one option would be to offer a very low-cost tickets such as £2 and this would represent your other fund. Paid tickets can be processed completely separately to the free tickets and can be handled on the same listing

If you decide to create a second listing you can collect the two listings together in an organisation page. Use the titles of the listing clearly state listing is HAf and which listing is your other fund

I hope one of these solutions will work for you

Hi Avida, neither of those solutions really work for us. We are based in one of the highest deprivation parts of the UK. Even families who aren’t on benefits-related free school meals are struggling, some are even more vulnerable because they are asylum seeker families or homeless families waiting for school places so not in the system yet. We don’t charge for any of our community activities, certainly not our holiday clubs. The system we have to use to satisfy the council shouldn’t force us to. Also having a separate listing doesn’t work well either. It gives us the same problems we already have, directing parents to 2 separate booking forms depending on their circumstances. Its just asking for confusion and means we are running 2 separate systems, which is completely unnecessary. Especially with a high proportion of ESOL parents, we’re going to end up with children in the wrong grouping, parents giving up because it’s too complicated, not to mention running 2 sets of registers, which is difficult for staff to manage. All you need to do is allow paid tickets to be zero cost. You already have the functionality in the system to allow for HAF and non-HAF tickets, if you made it possible for us to set non-HAF ‘paid’ tickets as free or £0 cost it solves all the problems.

I completely understand the scenario and sorry we can’t help at this time. We don’t have any plans in the immediate future to allow free non-HAF bookings on the same listing unfortunately.