Opening Your Setting
Extract from Coram Family and Childcare Trust report
Once your setting is registered with Ofsted, you can set an opening date and start promoting this to local families. Families who have already shown an interest are a useful starting point for this. It is likely that your setting will open with a small number of children registered and this will gradually increase over time. Your financial modelling needs to allow you to plan for a phased opening with demand building up over time. This will also help with settling children into the setting.
How will you advertise your nursery?
It is possible to list your nursery on local or national directories for childcare providers including the local Family Information Service and childcare.co.uk. It can also be useful to look at doing more promotion of the nursery at this point, including through attending local events and family activities, promoting the opening in local media and social media and even delivering fliers locally. Word of mouth is also a very effective method.
How will you register new families?
As part of the preparation for the Ofsted registration visit, you will have written policies around registering and settling new children which will now need to be implemented. These include gathering essential information from parents to enable safe care for the child, such as allergies and health conditions and contact details for parents and carers. You should share all relevant policies with the families who will be attending the childcare setting so that they can understand how the nursery will work. If families have not been involved in the set up of the nursery, it is particularly important to explain the parent led ethos to them at this stage and discuss the opportunities for them to get involved in the running of the nursery. Inviting a new family to be supported by a 'buddy' family is a way to begin to build relationships between your parent group from the beginning.
Will you require families to pay a deposit to secure a place?
Deposits can be a barrier to families on low incomes, however they are useful to ensure people are committed to joining the nursery, enabling you to make decisions about staffing. At Friendly Families Nursery we do not charge a deposit to families who are only using funded hours places. For other families we ask for a deposit equivalent to one months fees. This is fully refundable when families give one months notice of leaving. We discussed this approach at length with families and will continue to review it. Once the nursery has larger numbers of children and greater demand for places it may be possible to remove the need for a deposit.
How will you continue to advertise to local parents?
It’s important to keep promoting the nursery even after it has opened in order to build up the number of children attending to full capacity. Word of mouth can be a powerful recruitment tool so it is worth encouraging families currently using the setting to talk to other families they know about it. Asking parents where to advertise and how they can help to spread the word is another effective way to engage parents.
How will you advertise your nursery?
It is possible to list your nursery on local or national directories for childcare providers including the local Family Information Service and childcare.co.uk. It can also be useful to look at doing more promotion of the nursery at this point, including through attending local events and family activities, promoting the opening in local media and social media and even delivering fliers locally. Word of mouth is also a very effective method.
How will you register new families?
As part of the preparation for the Ofsted registration visit, you will have written policies around registering and settling new children which will now need to be implemented. These include gathering essential information from parents to enable safe care for the child, such as allergies and health conditions and contact details for parents and carers. You should share all relevant policies with the families who will be attending the childcare setting so that they can understand how the nursery will work. If families have not been involved in the set up of the nursery, it is particularly important to explain the parent led ethos to them at this stage and discuss the opportunities for them to get involved in the running of the nursery. Inviting a new family to be supported by a 'buddy' family is a way to begin to build relationships between your parent group from the beginning.
Will you require families to pay a deposit to secure a place?
Deposits can be a barrier to families on low incomes, however they are useful to ensure people are committed to joining the nursery, enabling you to make decisions about staffing. At Friendly Families Nursery we do not charge a deposit to families who are only using funded hours places. For other families we ask for a deposit equivalent to one months fees. This is fully refundable when families give one months notice of leaving. We discussed this approach at length with families and will continue to review it. Once the nursery has larger numbers of children and greater demand for places it may be possible to remove the need for a deposit.
How will you continue to advertise to local parents?
It’s important to keep promoting the nursery even after it has opened in order to build up the number of children attending to full capacity. Word of mouth can be a powerful recruitment tool so it is worth encouraging families currently using the setting to talk to other families they know about it. Asking parents where to advertise and how they can help to spread the word is another effective way to engage parents.