The Background
Seymour House are an outstanding nursery provider in every sense of the word. A large chain with 10 settings in Essex and Hertfordshire, they have one of the best inspection records in the UK with 100% of outcomes being judged Outstanding by Ofsted in the last cycle of inspection.
Director, Jonathan Player, confirms that the driving force behind Seymour House is the ambition to provide high quality childcare. Their success in achieving this has allowed them to grow over the past 30 years to the 10 highly esteemed settings they own and run today.
The Challenge
Jonathan and his team were using an Access database to manage their attendance and billing. He told us,
The Access database was something we were very proud of it until we saw the advances Connect had achieved with their system! Our main focus must always remain on providing quality care and education and would never have been able to keep up with the developments to the system that Connect Childcare could achieve.We realised fairly quickly that in order to keep our administration as streamlined as possible, we needed a purpose built Nursery Management System so we began to look at options.
The Solution
“We trialled a number of systems to make sure we were making the right decision. Connect Childcare was by far the most advanced. It had a large enough infrastructure to support current versions, develop improvements and facilitate expansion. It was absolutely the best fit for Seymour House.”
“We decided to to implement iConnect and ParentZone along with Connect Childcare across all 10 settings.”
The team at Seymour House took to the software with ease. The onboarding process was managed smoothly and made the transition seamless.
The onsite training sessions we had made sure that all of our users were familiar and confident with the system before we went live, and the ongoing support from Connect Childcare’s team was very good. The Help Desk is effective and whenever we need a response it’s only a click away.
The Result
“Connect Childcare ensures that our processes are simple and consistent. It allows our team to focus on what they do best; care and education.”
Connect Childcare and iConnect have become an integral part of daily life at Seymour House. On an average month their staff record 18,000 observations of child development, showing the progress that children make in their care.
Relationships between Key Workers and parents have strengthened, with parents using ParentZone to share important information and actively contribute to their children’s learning journey.
We get consistently positive feedback from Parents who love that they can keep track of their child's progress at nursery in real time. Modern working patterns mean that drop off and pick ups don't necessarily match with the shift patterns of a Key Person. On the days where Parents don't have a handover from the child's Key Person, they can communicate progress, activities or care information via ParentZone.” We are extremely happy with the decision to use Connect Childcare’s products and the results we have seen since implementing it. It has given us the capacity to get on with new things, safe in the knowledge the nurseries are running effectively and consistently.
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