It has been very encouraging working with over a hundred providers around the country over the past few weeks, discussing and sharing our mutual concerns, ideas and aspirations around the Government’s 30 hours free childcare offer. Once we all realised we have a common goal and were neither trying to justify the policy, or indeed, influence individual opinions on the offer, we were able to look creatively at what practical options there are for making this challenging policy

We have lots of questions from childcare providers around how to increase occupancy to ensure their setting is full and sustainable. Usually they ask this question when their numbers are low, which is sometimes too late to prevent financial issues, but the main source of their trouble is more often the lack of any regular marketing, ......no wonder they don't have a full setting! What leads to this situation? ....Well the standard response we encounter is "parents come to us

Why do you need to understand your costs? As business advisers when we talk about understanding costs we are really focused on a couple of important areas. Firstly, we concentrate on what each service you offer costs you to deliver per child, per hour. So if you provide care for 2, 3 and 4 year olds there is likely to be a different cost per child, per hour between age ranges.......obvious really!...... you have different staff ratios for different age ranges, so costs will b

If you are anything like me you may have struggled to embrace all the good that we can find in the use of social media both in our personal lives and more importantly, for me at least, in our business environment. I think it's an age thing to some degree, my children were part of the social media revolution where they had to embrace new ways of communicating and socialising in rapid succession if they were to have a fulfilled life with all the social contact they needed both