'How we kept our nursery open through a coronavirus outbreak'

Having kept half of our Acorn Early Years Foundation nurseries open throughout the lockdown period, to provide essential childcare for keyworkers and vulnerable children, we did expect that at some point we’d have a positive test result to deal with in one of our 12 nurseries, and we thought we were well prepared, with our carefully separated bubbles and rigorous hygiene procedures. 

The scale of the outbreak at Westcroft, however, took us by surprise in the way it quickly escalated to nine children and four staff testing positive, and it was a steep learning curve for both us and the local Public Health England (PHE). 

The saga unfolds

On Thursday 11 June, a member of staff received a positive test result after taking the previous day off with what she thought were hay fever symptoms, but 'had a test to be on the safe side', and we immediately sent the rest of her bubble home to self-isolate for 14 days and encouraged them all to get tested if they could (but most found they couldn’t, unless they had symptoms!).

We also informed all the other nursery parents, and were very glad we’d included out-of-hours contact numbers to them, as our health and safety manager then received a phone call on the Saturday from a parent of a child in a different bubble, whose child had been tested the day before due to feeling unwell, and this had also been positive!

A busy day of phone calls to all of the second bubble’s families followed, as they also needed to self-isolate. Our discussions with PHE early the following week reassured us that we hadn’t done anything wrong, we didn’t need to close, and they were happy with our bubble separation and hygiene procedures. 

They then asked us if we’d be willing to be a test site for them to research virus transmission, which meant making tests available to ALL staff, children and their wider family members.  It also meant that we had to collate all the test results (with relevant permissions) as the testing system had no way of separating out ‘our’ test results, particularly as there were three different ways of getting tested.

At this point I have to say that we are very fortunate in having a very proactive and involved senior management team that immediately sprang into action to support the nursery manager and her team, and we have often commented to each other over the last couple of weeks, 'how on earth would a single nursery cope with this on their own?'

Our Public Health England contact has acknowledged the extraordinary additional workload that it placed us under – we had brought part of that on ourselves, by agreeing to be part of their research, but we were keen to be as helpful as we could.

Our final tally of cases came to 23, when the wider household members were included, with 11 of those being from just two families.  Our biggest concern by far was whether anyone would be seriously ill, so we were hugely relieved that everyone recovered relatively quickly, especially the children, some of whom weren’t ill at all, despite testing positive.

In the press

The wider testing of household members resulted in a significant rise in the number of positive tests, so the coverage online by our local news site wasn’t really surprising – we had become increasingly bemused by the local press reporting ‘no new cases in Milton Keynes’ when we knew about nine positive test results quite early on.

What was unexpected, though, was being covered by the national press, including BBC Look East doing a report from outside the nursery one evening. Even more of a surprise was the tone of the coverage. When we discovered that it had been covered by the Mirror, the Daily Star and an American news site, we were anxious about what angle they’d take, but in fact they simply duplicated the press release from PHE – and the American site was more interested in understanding how the bubble system worked. 

The only one to be negative was, surprisingly, the BBC, with their headline 'Nursery stays open as 23 test positive' which made us sound completely irresponsible. We had so much praise and support from our parents and official agencies about how we’d dealt with everything, it was really disappointing and upsetting to be the victim of lazy journalism, especially when it resulted in some nasty comments to nursery staff from members of the general public asking ‘why are you still open?’  This was particularly difficult as by the time that happened, our bubbles had started returning from their 14-day isolation.

The learning points from our experience:

• Encourage anyone with any kind of symptom to get tested. Almost 40 per cent of our cases were either asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms that weren’t on the official list.
• Have a prepared message or statement ready in case of confirmed cases so that communication can be swift to all parties. Prepared media statements (and agreed with PHE) were really useful to take the pressure off. 
• Be open and honest with parents from the start. We sent a message out immediately to all parents, but followed it up with phone calls to each family – this is VERY time-consuming, but I’m sure it was the main reason our parents were so supportive throughout, and it gave us a very good understanding of parents’ concerns and perspectives. 
• Understand the process. Parents will ask ‘what if’ and ‘what next’ questions, so be clear about the self-isolation timescales, how they differ depending on test results, and when children can return to nursery. If you get involved in data-gathering for PHE, make sure you understand data protection rules about permissions, and exactly what details are needed.  Hopefully the systems will improve so that you don’t end up doing the amount of additional work that we did!
• Support your staff team – don’t underestimate the time and emotional energy that it will take up, and recognise that everyone deals with stress differently, and may have different levels of support outside of the nursery. Our management team in the nursery and centrally worked incredibly hard, and the teamwork, even if it was mostly remote, was amazing.

The final words need to come from the nursery parents.   We had so many messages of support from them that it’s hard to choose just one, but here are just a few extracts:

'Well done to you guys for how you handled the shutting down of the bubbles…we have been kept well informed of relevant developments…we have been impressed throughout with all the measures that have been introduced…you are handling this crisis so well, keep up the good work…'

There was even one from a parent-to-be, posted on local social media:  'I’d just like to say that I went to view this nursery for my daughter about three weeks ago and they were following procedure to the letter, social distancing, hand sanitisers, no parents allowed in (I went in after they had closed with just the nursery manager, under instruction not to touch anything) etc.  I had planned to send my daughter there in September and still will be if they have a place available.'

If you do things right, to the best of your ability, your best defenders in the face of bad publicity will always be your community of parents!