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Laura is loved and respected by her Acorn colleagues in her role as head of early years and compliance. She leads a team of three early years managers who support the group’s 16 nurseries in ensuring that consistently high standards are maintained in early years care and education.
She is empathetic, having had a wealth of hands-on experience, and she continues to take on a practical supporting role whenever she finds herself at a nursery which would benefit from an extra pair of hands. She uses these opportunities to build a rapport with colleagues, to identify areas for improvement and to role-model excellent practice.
Laura has taken the lead on several initiatives, including representing the PVI sector on Early Years Reference Groups, organising network meetings and engaging with a local domestic abuse charity to provide work placements and employment opportunities for women living in the refuge. She has built a very valuable relationship with the local college, which now promotes the group’s vacancies to its childcare students.
Above all, Laura is an expert in compliance and safeguarding. She has developed robust systems and policies to ensure effectiveness in these areas across the group. Along with being a leader, she uses her team’s strengths to complement her own and has mentored and supported nursery managers in their own leadership skills. She encourages and empowers colleagues to develop confidence.
Laura’s hands-on approach means that she is often involved in directly supporting children and their families. For example, when Acorn had to relocate children and staff from one of its nurseries, Laura arranged individual transition discussions with key persons, parents and carers to ensure each child’s individual needs were met. She supported practitioners who were nervous about the move and liaised with families.
As well as being a superb role model in dealing with parents and children, Laura has also developed an empathetic and effective way of resolving issues with individual staff. She has an instinctive ability to pinpoint issues causing stress to managers and has developed a highly effective staging process to support them in dealing with difficult situations, guiding them to the point where they feel confident to deal with them on their own.
Laura stays up-to-date with sector issues and best practice and has developed effective partnerships with experts in the sector and external safeguarding agencies. She works well with Ofsted and has completed a Master’s degree. Laura is a ‘rock’ everyone relies on.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Rebecca Casserly, Nurtured Childcare – North of England
Operations director Rebecca has a strong vision for the group and always works hard to achieve it. She is fundamental in guiding staff to provide high-quality provision across all the sites. Every day, she shows that she wants the best for staff, children and their families and always puts them first before herself. Rebecca understands the challenges that managers face and is keen to learn new things and use these to support her managers to be the best they can be. She listens to her employees and works on the ground with them to support whenever she can.
FINALISTS
Emma Bate, Storal – Nationwide
Charlotte Bateman, Little Barn Owls Forest and Farm School Nurseries – Horsham, West Sussex
Georgina Hempstead, The Old Station Nursery Group – Nationwide
CRITERION
Open to senior employees of nursery groups working across some orall of the company’s settings, who display exemplary leadership and management skills in enabling consistent high quality across the nurseries for the benefit of children, families, staff and the group.
