The Background
Canterbury Day Nursery is a popular, committee run, charity setting in the heart of Canterbury. Originally founded in 1974 as a Gingerbread Group the setting is an integral part of their local community. The Management team have worked together for over 20 years, successfully adapting and growing over the years. They now operate a setting for up to 100 children as well as a busy Out of School Club.
The team are passionate about giving all children a great start in life and focus on child led activities and learning. Their friendly, homely setting has enabled them to remain attractive to local families, as well as quality staff, many of whom have been with the setting for 10 years or more.
The Challenge
The staff at Canterbury Day Nursery used a combination of spreadsheets and paperwork to manage their whole setting, something that was becoming more and more of a burden. After identifying that they were spending too much time on paperwork they decided to look for something that would lessen the load and relieve stress for their team.
Nursery Manager, Sally Cavaglieri, said;
We wanted to be able to lessen the paperwork for our staff, use something that looked more professional and to be able to share easily with our parents and improve our partnership. It needed to be affordable, easy to use and something we could adapt to suit our needs.
The Solution
Sally and the team set to work researching the different software that was available. They had a clear idea of what they needed from the start, top of the list was value for money and great after care and support.
“We chose iConnect as it suited our needs and was such a great deal.”
After making the decision to adopt iConnect and ParentZone into their setting the team were impressed with the support they received. Sally told us,
We were given great support from the start, we were able to put it all into place quite quickly and we used the twilight training sessions to share with our team. It’s great to know online support is on hand quickly and makes adopting a new system so much easier
It was a little scary at first, relying on iConnect for everything, but now our staff really enjoy using the software, they find it so much quicker and can exchange information and observations with parents so easily.
The Result
The introduction of iConnect and ParentZone had a huge impact on parental engagement at Canterbury Day Nursery.
“We love being able to share the daily events and observations with parents on parentzone. It’s easy to share all aspects of a child’s day and our parents love the fact that they can tap into observations daily and see how their child's day has gone. We get lots of observations uploaded by parents, they like the fact they can be included by contributing to the child’s profile.”
It’s not just parental engagement that’s improved, Sally has used iConnect’s reporting features to her advantage to further increase the quality of provision they provide.
Now that we can track children's progress and levels of development, we can see where the gaps are which enables us to provide a better bespoke provision for our individual children.Sally and the Canterbury Day Nursery team are delighted with their decision to use iConnect and ParentZone. It has met their needs by reducing paperwork, providing value for money and having great ongoing support.
With iConnect, our staff are able to spend more direct time with the children and we look, and feel, more professional within our business.
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