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Learning Lab » Tips & Tricks » Managing Stretched and Non-Stretched Funding on Tapestry

Illustration of a practitioner editing a child's schedule in their office, to apply stretched funding.
  • Tips & Tricks

Managing Stretched and Non-Stretched Funding on Tapestry

  • September 19, 2025
  • By Kat
  • 4 min read

Funding can get complicated — especially when you’re balancing stretched hours, non-stretched hours, school holidays, and unexpected closures. On Tapestry, a little setup at the start can save you a lot of time later when you’re managing schedules and invoices.

Funding Types in Tapestry

A quick reminder before we dive in:

  • Funding types don’t affect invoices — they’re for reference only.
  • Funded hours need to be added to children’s schedules manually.
  • Closures are not charged for.
  • Holidays are not charged for unless the child is marked to attend during holidays.
  • Absences are chargeable.

Stretched vs Non-Stretched Funding

The key difference is whether children attend during school holidays:

  • Non-stretched funding: Children only attend during term dates. If they attend extra sessions in the holidays, these should be added as extra bookings.
  • Stretched funding: Children continue to attend during school holidays, with their funded hours spread more evenly across the year.

The simplest way to keep this organised is to create two sessions in your account: one for stretched and one for non-stretched. This makes it easy to see which hours are which when you’re reviewing schedules. Remember though, as they are essentially the same session, keep the cost the same.

Don’t forget: closures and holiday dates need to be set up in your account, as they will let you differentiate the children with stretched funding and the children with non-stretched funding.

Screenshot of a child's regular schedule on Tapestry, showing that the child attends in school holidays and that a stretched session has been selected.

Holiday Attendance

  • Children on non-stretched funding should not be marked as attending during school holidays (unless you add extra bookings).
  • Children on stretched funding should be marked as attending during school holidays, so their hours are included correctly in your reports.

You can find this option when adding/editing a child’s regular schedule, in the top left. You can see it in the screenshot above, to the left of the Funding dropdown.

Handling Closures and Bank Holidays

Closures — including bank holidays — need a little extra attention, especially if they fall on days when children usually attend.

Here’s how closures work in Tapestry:

  • If your setting is closed, no children will attend and no sessions will be charged for.
  • If a closure falls on a day a child usually attends, their funded hours for that day won’t be counted.

This means their total funded hours could look lower for that week. To fix this, you’ll need to adjust their schedule so the hours are reallocated.

Example

Let’s say a child normally attends five days a week and receives 15 hours of funding (roughly 3 hours per day). If a bank holiday falls on a Monday (where 3 funded hours were allocated), that week will only show 12 funded hours.

To correct this:

  1. End the child’s existing schedule the week before the bank holiday.
  2. Create a new schedule covering the week of the bank holiday:
    • Remove funded hours from the closure day.
    • Reallocate those hours to another day(s) in the same week.
  3. Duplicate the original schedule to resume the week after.
Screenshot showing an edit regular schedule, where the schedule has been split into three parts. The middle schedule is for a two week period where there is a bank holiday, to show that you need to reallocate funding to another day in the week.

Exporting to Funding Loop

If your local authority uses Funding Loop, you don’t need to re-key any of this information; once your funding is set up correctly, Tapestry can export your invoice data straight into a format ready to upload to, with no manual re-entry needed. All Tapestry customers have access to this, whatever package you’re on. Take a look at our tutorial on exporting to Funding Loop to see how it’s done.

Final Thoughts

By setting up your funding types, sessions, holidays, and closures carefully, you’ll make it much easier to manage stretched and non-stretched funding on Tapestry.

If you need a reminder for how to add a regular schedule for a child, you can take a look at our tutorial.

Kat

Brand & Campaign Design Specialist
Kat joined the ranks of the Product Support Team just in time for the September rush in 2019, and spent several years becoming a Tapestry expert and getting to know our customers. She then moved into the Marketing Team and now spends her time designing digital and printed content, building and maintaining the company websites, and learning to be a web developer. In her spare time she enjoys wearing full plate armour and swinging swords about, and will happily challenge anyone to a duel over the last chocolate Hobnob.

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