Hi Esox11
Thank you for your post. I am William the
child maintenance Options consultant. I can give you some information that may help you decide when your child maintenance will stop.
If you wanted to use the statutory rules, regular child maintenance payments are made until a child is 16 years old, or 20 and in full-time, non-advanced education, or for as long as Child Benefit is being paid. The definition of full-time education is more than 12 hours a week of supervised study, on a course up to and including A-level standard. Some examples of non-advanced education are:
GCSEs
A-levels
iGCSEs
Pre-U
International Baccalaureate
NVQ/SVQ level 1, 2 or 3
BTEC National Diploma, National Certificate and First Diploma
SCE higher grade or similar
If your daughter is in advanced or higher education, they would no longer qualify for child maintenance. Some examples of advanced and higher education are:
A degree
Diploma of Higher Education
NVQ level 4 or above
BTEC Higher National Certificate (HNC)
Teacher training
However, you did mentioned that child maintenance is current being paid via a family-based arrangement. With this type of agreement, there are no strict rules to stick to. Therefore, both you and your daughter''s mother have the flexibility to decide when her child maintenance will stop. The main thing is that both of you are in agreement.
A family-based arrangement does not need to be all about money. It can include other kinds of support, such as you directly paying for things that your daughter needs. A family-based arrangement is not legally enforceable, however, many parents prefer this type of agreement because it is very flexible and can be reviewed and changed to meet the needs of your daughter.
We have a number of guides and tools that can help keep your agreement amicable. We have discussion guide that you can use to plan your conversations with your daughter''s mother. We also have a family-based arrangement form, which is not a legally-binding document, but it can help to formalise your arrangement if you use it to write down what has been agreed. You can gain access to our tools and guides by visiting our website at
www.cmoptions.org/en/toolbox.
To give you an indication of how much maintenance may be calculated if you were to use the services of the Child Support Agency (CSA), there is an online calculator on our website at
www.cmoptions.org/en/calculator/calculator.asp. You may wish to use this figure when negotiating child maintenance for your family-based arrangement.
If you would like more information about family-based arrangement, please visit our website at
www.cmoptions.org. Alternatively, you can call us free on 0800 988 0988 between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday or 9am and 4pm on Saturday. We also have a Sorting Out Separation web-app that you may find useful. It offers help and support to separated families. The link is:
www.wikivorce.com/divorce/Sorting-Out-Separation.html 
