The chain currently has 17 neighbourhood nurseries offering 1,113 places.
It was ranked at number 16 in the summer 2006 issue of the Nursery World supplement Nursery Chains.
Director Tom Hobbs told Nursery World that the settings on the market were not part of the planned 'clusters' of nurseries which form the 'core business'.
The four nurseries are in Dudley in the West Midlands, Middlesbrough in Teesside, and Lowestoft and Ipswich in Suffolk. They offer a combined total of 338 places.
Mr Hobbs said that the reason that those settings were for sale was 'just the fact that they are not in clusters and so are difficult to manage. We want to focus on developing in clusters.'
The Wind in the Willows group's main nursery clusters are around Manchester, Merseyside, Stoke-on-Trent and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire. Its head office is in Wigan.
Mr Hobbs said, 'We had a development strategy, but some settings are out on their own. We thought we would be able to develop other neighbourhood nurseries in those areas, but it hasn't come to fruition.'
Wind in the Willows currently has seven children's centres, which have developed from the neighbourhood nurseries model. Mr Hobbs confirmed the nurseries for sale were not Sure Start children's centres, but added that prospective buyers might choose to develop them as such.
Earlier this year, Buffer Bear, which operates 40 nurseries, closed six neighbourhood nurseries when low occupancy levels and the threat from local authority children's centres meant the group could no longer afford to keep them open (News, 11 May). However, the chain retains 20 neighbourhood nurseries.
