In 2025, the big three nursery groups remain unchanged at the top of our table of the UK's largest groups, but for how long? For many years the table has been dominated by Busy Bees and Bright Horizons as the two largest operators of nurseries in the country, but that could soon change with the challenge of Kids Planet.
While firmly in third place, the Manchester-based group continues to expand, gaining 52 more settings in the last 12 months and increasing the number of places it offers from 15,841 to 19,258.
Its acquisitions include the Hollies Nursery Group, with five settings in Nottingham, in August.
Kids Planet now operates just 17 fewer nursery settings than Bright Horizons, having grown dramatically in the last few years with private equity backing.
Meanwhile, both Busy Bees and Bright Horizons have lost nurseries over the last year. Bright Horizons has 30 fewer settings. Busy Bees is down by nine nurseries, but has expanded the places it offers by 429 on last year's table.
Partou is now the fourth-largest group, offering 8,181 places.
Last year, the largest Dutch childcare operator brought all its UK nurseries under the Partou name following a merger of the nurseries that it had acquired from All About Children and Just Childcare. It also continues to acquire other settings, such as the 142-place Wonder Years nursery last summer.
One significant deal of the year among the largest UK groups was the acquisition by Storal of the long-established Children 1st nurseries, with the move doubling its operation in size.
Started by founder and chair Margaret Mason in 1988, Children 1st grew to 24 nurseries during its 36 years, with settings across the Midlands, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and into South Yorkshire.
Storal acquired all but one of the Children 1st nurseries last October, with just one nursery kept on by its founder for the running of The Margaret Mason Children 1st Trust. Storal also bought the group's training centre.
It is now the tenth-largest group in the UK with 56 nurseries and 5,301 places.
Commenting on the deal, Sarah Mackenzie, chief executive of Storal, said, ‘Throughout my career, I've looked to Children 1st as one of the great pioneers of high-quality early years education in the sector. I have enormous admiration for everything Margaret has built and believe she has created an everlasting legacy – both at Children 1st and in the wider sector.’
In July, Happy Days bought the Toddletown group of two sites in Godalming and Farnham, and one in Chandlers Ford – all of which are based outside of the group's current operational area, the South-West of England. It now operates 30 nurseries and has moved up three places to 21 in the table.
In the bottom half of the table, Dukes Education (Little Dukes) and Kido are both new entries, in 24th and 25th place, respectively.
Last year, Dukes Education, which runs nurseries under the Little Dukes name, acquired the four Pippa Pop-ins Nursery Schools in West London, cited by Christie & Co. as the highest-value group operating company transaction to complete in the UK last year.
Kido Nursery Schools now owns 18 nurseries across London.
Generally, however, 2024 did not see large acquisitions among the big nursery groups.
The sector faces many challenges in 2025, not least the rise in employer National Insurance contributions and the minimum wage in April, and for nurseries in England, the ongoing issue of business rates.
With the Government childcare expansion for nine-month-olds well under way, it remains to be seen what this will mean on the ground for groups, which are usually better placed than standalone settings to expand their provision.
However, some large nursery owners have told Nursery World that they have put acquisition and expansion plans for their existing settings on hold for now, while they wait to see how the impact of these changes on their business plays out.
New names
There are some new faces in our directory this year.
They include RAFAKidz, the group that is owned by the Royal Airforces Association and which caters mainly for military families.
In 2024, RAFAKidz Cranwell in Sleaford, Lincolnshire was named our Nursery of the Year. The group now operates 17 settings and plans to open more nurseries in April.
Other new entrants include Chalk Farm Nursery Group, which was established last year by investment manager Downing, aft er it bought Katey's Nursery and Pre-school, a chain of five nurseries in South-West London, followed by the three Red Bus Bristol-based nurseries.
The 25 largest groups offer a combined total of 162,129 places, 8,050 more nursery places than last year. They operate 2,010 settings, up from 1,926 in 2024.
Making the grade: how do the chains measure up?
The Childbase Partnership is once again top of our Ofsted quality table with all of its nurseries graded Outstanding or Good. Congratulations! The London Early Years Foundation is in second place, and ranking third is Duke's Education's Little Dukes.
This may well be the last time we publish this quality table in its current form, with Ofsted consulting on plans to move away from an overall one-word judgement towards a more ‘nuanced’ approach, including a five-point scale to grade areas of a setting's work, and new report cards to set out the grades a provider achieves in each area, alongside a short description.
We will need to wait and see what emerges from this before deciding on the best way to represent quality in nurseries operated by the biggest nursery groups. As always, we welcome your comments.
NOTES ON THE TABLE
Our analysis of the Ofsted reports of the biggest groups includes all those from the Top 25 League Table. The figures in brackets are the groups’ positions in the last issue of Nursery Chains, published in spring 2024.
- Compiled from the latest published Ofsted reports.
- The percentages given are based on the number of published Ofsted reports.
- We have only included nurseries registered and inspected by Ofsted, and excluded nurseries in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland,which fall under different inspection regimes. Also excluded are settings inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI).
- We have noted where Ofsted reports are unavailable; for example, if settings are new registrations because they have only recently launched, or have been acquired and re-registered.
Table rankings
We allocated points to each setting on the basis of its Ofsted report. For each group, the total number of points was then divided by the number of available reports to give a final score. Figures in brackets show last year’s position.
Outstanding: 5 points
Good: 3 points
Requires improvement: 1 point
Inadequate: -2 points
- Do you have a comment on this article, or would you like to feature in our next edition of Nursery Chains? Get in touch at catherine.gaunt@markallengroup.com
