Nursery Chains: Award Winners - Raising the bar

Jennie Johnson’s 'eureka moment' happened on a busy train journey from Manchester to London. Then a mother of two young children and working as a director in IT, the founder and chief executive of our award-winning nursery group was trying to ‘make do and mend with informal childcare’, using her mother-in-law, best friend and gran, and childcare arrangements often broke down.

‘My childcare had fallen through. I did make the train to London but it was a close call. I was so stressed – I was pondering my life and how I really didn’t have the right childcare in place.’ Ms Johnson had been looking for nurseries but wasn’t happy at all with what she had found. ‘On that train journey I decided to start a childcare company,’ she says.

It was December 2002. ‘The next day I handed in my notice. I came up with the name and registered the domain name of the website that night. I worked my six months’ notice and on 23 May 2003 I rented a small office in Salford and started writing the business plan,’ says Ms Johnson.

Helped by her aunt and ex-colleague Maureen, they came up with a 150-page business plan. ‘We both had senior positions and understood business. We approached banks, VCs [venture capital investors] and pitched – did the Dragons’ Den thing.’

The first nursery opened in Cheadle Royal Business Park in Manchester in September 2005, followed by Christie Fields Centre in West Didsbury in May 2006.

Fast-forward 15 years and Kids Allowed is Nursery World’s Nursery Group of the Year 2017, and a multi-million-pound childcare operator. So, without a background in early years, how did Ms Johnson approach the sector? ‘It was a big learning curve,’ she says. ‘I visited a lot of nurseries and went to Early Excellence in Huddersfield. Everything started to slot into place. As a mother I began to understand it. I had to get a really great manager to open the first setting.’

As with all new businesses there have been some bumps along the road. ‘At our first Ofsted inspection we were graded “satisfactory”. I was gutted. We’re now Outstanding,’ she says.

Kids Allowed may only have six nurseries, but the group provides more than 1,000 childcare places.

‘We always feel that we open great locations on quite a large scale. We open in very dense urban areas where you need childcare provision.’

Ms Johnson says the business model was conceived as a large multi-site group and the nurseries are designed to provide places for around 200 children. At one site ‘we made the decision to go up and build a first floor and a roof garden – 12,000 square feet’.

Despite their size she says the nurseries have ‘homely, comfortable rooms’, children have a base room, and every room has direct access to the outdoors.

Kids Allowed Christie Fields Centre, Manchester

Curriculum

‘Over the years we’ve become very clear about our own pedagogy,’ Ms Johnson says. Rather than nursery staff studying for a generic Level 3 qualification at college, the nursery owner says she likes to train staff at Kids Allowed’s own academy.

‘Because we have our own qualification, we have generic content but we can obviously enhance that with our own pedagogical approach. For example, we don’t write down observations, but we observe children every day – we don’t do a lot of paperwork.

‘It’s about “right here, right now”, following the child’s interests. We always have the blank sheet of paper.’

Children don’t wear aprons, she explains, because ‘the majority of children would rather get stuck in’.

Talking about the Kids Allowed ethos, Ms Johnson says, ‘It’s all done through play. There’s lots of self-directed learning.’

It’s about nurturing children’s independence, she says. ‘If it takes them half an hour to put their coat on, let them do it at their own pace. It’s about creating an environment to support every child to fulfil their potential.’

Although she started the nursery group without a background in childcare, Ms Johnson is now qualified to Level 3. ‘The reason I did it was because I wanted to know why we were getting people who didn’t have a deep knowledge of child development. What we’re after is fabulous practice.’

To this end, Kids Allowed set up its academy six years ago to grow its own talent and instil the right values in the nursery team.

The group has very high rates of staff retention. ‘Parents love the fact that they see familiar faces,’ Ms Johnson says. ‘It’s about excellence in everything we do; it starts to mean we’ve got something a bit special.’

Ms Johnson takes part in the induction of all new staff members. ‘It’s really important that the passion I have for the business is heard by new colleagues,’ she says. ‘The idea being we’re all here for new colleagues.’

The academy’s apprenticeship scheme, which recruits once a year, is growing the group’s own unit managers and above. The 2017/18 cohort, which started at the academy last month, is made up of 40 apprentices. Apprentices are supernumerary to start with and then over the 12 months become part of the team counting in ratios.

There is also a Level 2 pathway, which was prompted by the recruitment crisis caused by the GCSE rule.

‘We don’t turn people away. In 2017 we launched our Level 4 qualification, and as soon as there are apprenticeships for Levels 5, 6 and 7, we’ll be offering them,’ says Ms Johnson, whose commitment to apprenticeships was recognised when she was awarded an MBE for services to apprenticeships in June last year.

Kids Allowed Christie Fields Centre, Manchester

Expansion

Kids Allowed has two more sites planned, with a new 180-place nursery set to open in Altrincham, providing childcare for up to 300 families and creating 80 new jobs. ‘We’re building it at the moment,’ Ms Johnson says. ‘We’re very excited to get it open. It’s opening on 5 March 2018.’

Plans to open a 150-place nursery elsewhere in Greater Manchester are also under way. This will take the group’s registered nursery places to just under 1,400 across eight sites.

Commenting on the group’s expansion plans, Ms Johnson stresses, ‘We’re not in a land grab. We look for quality locations. It’s a really healthy way to do it.’

All of the group’s nurseries are near ‘main arterial roads, all prominent, all easy to see. Traditional home-based nurseries are not interesting for us – there’s not enough outdoor space.’

Last year, Kids Allowed won the bid to run the workplace nursery at the University Hospital of South Manchester, providing childcare for the hospital staff and the community. The nursery opens earlier in the day to match sessions with shift patterns.

‘We were delighted to win it, it’s been a success,’ says Ms Johnson, adding that there is ‘a distinct possibility’ that the group may consider running more nurseries in the future based on this model.

Ms Johnson says that as a mother she has thought about what parents need help with, what she calls ‘the more mundane tasks’. As well as offering laundry and dry-cleaning services and dealing with postal deliveries, the nurseries also have a pop-up hairdresser for the children – ‘parents love it’ – and free tea and coffee. ‘The concept is about looking after mum and dad,’ she adds.

There are also workshops for parents on learning through play, which Ms Johnson delivers personally.

So, how did it feel to win Nursery Group of the Year? ‘We were absolutely thrilled on the night, it was really good,’ she says.

Reflecting on the business that she started, Ms Johnson says, ‘It’s genuinely true – the fact of the matter is that 15 years ago there wasn’t a single provider I was happy with. I’m a massive advocate for early years – there are some wonderful providers out there now.’