Having worked in childcare since the age of 16, Emma Pike decided to go that extra step and start running her own nursery.
She is now 29 and has just taken over the Gateway Nursery in Harlow, Essex. As well as it being her first nursery, she has acquired a site that was losing money and is determined to turn it around.
'All my family is in childcare and I started off working for my aunt who runs a nursery,' she says. 'At 19, I became a manager and have always dreamed of having my own nursery.
'At Gateway, I have changed quite a lot of things already. I have managed to make the toddler room bigger and more spacious by combining two of the rooms into one. I want to make one of the big cupboards into a baby massage area so we can have mums come in and do massage with their babies. I want to have a sensory area and the outside play area now has a baby area,' she says.
The nursery opened in July and for the first month, Ms Pike was still working as a manager at another nursery while also running Gateway. She says, 'It was a hard month, but it has been quite quiet since the school holidays, as many of the children are in receipt of the free funding from the Government which doesn't run over the holidays. We have 25 children at the moment, but it will get much busier in September.'
The nursery is based in the Gateway Centre which also houses Gateway Freedom Church, so a Christian ethos runs through the practice at the nursery.
'We don't celebrate Halloween as we respect the fact that we are in a Christian community,' says Ms Pike. 'But we will celebrate all the different religious festivals as we are in a very multicultural community.'
The nursery has places for 64 children and takes them from three months to when they start school. Funding is scarce at the moment and Ms Pike has been unable to access any grants, so she has had to come up with all the investment herself.
She admits that her big concern, due to the flexible funding for threeto four-year-olds, will be staying solvent in the holidays.
All the staff who worked at the nursery before she took it over have been kept on. There are 15 staff trained to different levels and the deputy manager has an Early Years foundation degree.
'A lot of the staff were temporary agency staff so we have taken them on permanently, which has given them security,' she says.
She has not done any marketing to promote the nursery and is relying on word of mouth and a number of promotional events such as a fun day to publicise the fact that the setting is under new ownership.
Her ambition for the nursery is for it to get an 'outstanding' Ofsted. Ms Pike says, 'I want to give children here the best environment to develop and I want the staff to be able to progress and get all the training they need. I also want to get parents more on board and run parent forums and get their feedback and ideas.'
Another aim is to get back to basics and free up time for the staff to play with the children rather than sitting doing their paperwork.
'I want to find a way of reducing the planning they have to do. I want to have regular group meetings where we can brainstorm and do the planning together on a piece of A3 paper. I am still looking at the logistics of it all. Ultimately, I want to take the staff back to playing.'
