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Dear Parent’s,

We hope that you are all well and safe during this difficult time.  As you will be aware, the government have asked us to prepare to re-open for all children from 1st June.

In order to prepare for this we will be putting additional measures in place to minimise the risk of infection on our premises.

  • We will be increasing our use of the outdoor provision throughout the day; this will enable us to care for small groups of children in different areas of the nursery. To help us to facilitate this please ensure that your child has outdoor clothing and footwear. We will also be using our outdoor classroom more frequently.
  • We will be limiting staff movement within the provision. Staff will only care for their designated group of children and will not be moving freely within the setting. This will also be enforced during their break times, where they will not mix with staff from other rooms.
  • We will be undertaking staff training prior to opening to re -enforce health and hygiene procedures and to plan how we will continue to support children with embedding health and hygiene routines.
  • We will be removing some items of soft furnishings and soft toys from the setting to ease cleaning and minimise expose to infection.
  • We will be continuing to ask parents to drop children off outside the nursery and observe social distancing with other families on our premises. To achieve this we will be looking at welcoming children through different entrances.

You may have noticed that we have removed our closure dates from the March invoices. This is a goodwill gesture during these difficult times. Originally, we asked for parents to honour payment of these pre-booked sessions so we could pay our team for March and also in accordance with our terms and conditions.  Now that we have been able to access the government furlough scheme, we have credited these sessions back to parents and extend our thanks for supporting us during these extremely difficult circumstances.

We have been one of only 2 settings in the Moorlands who have remained open for key worker children and are extremely proud of our team who have made this possible. We take our social and community responsibilities very seriously and are proud to have made a small contribution towards the fight against COVID-19.

As we prepare to re-open, we now need to confirmation of the numbers of children returning to nursery from 1st June.  We have re-opened parents accounts and activated children’s usual daily bookings from June 1st. Therefore, we would be grateful if parents could speak to us as soon as possible to either:

  1. Confirm their child will be returning to their regular booking from the 1st June.
  2. Request a change to the regular booking.

Further to our previous email. We are hopeful that many of our 3-year-old children will stay with us for their nursery year, we continue to offer outstanding care and education within a rural environment. In addition to the educational value of staying at Teddy’s we offer greater flexibility with regard to the delivery of funded sessions (over 2, 3,4 or 5 days) and are also a teacher led provider. We are aware that the government have considered delaying entry into school for some children in a bid to reduce infection level due to the numbers of children on school sites at a time. As previously outlined nonattendance of school nursery provision does not reduce your child’s chance of gaining a reception place as these are subject to a different application process and criteria.

We do realise that there is a possibility that some parents will not want their child to return to nursery due to maternity leave, not returning work until their child enters reception, or changes in personal circumstances. Therefore, we respectfully ask that parents inform us as soon as possible in accordance with our 4 weeks’ notice period. We fully understand the impact of the lockdown period for some of our families and are happy to speak to parents about their individual concerns or difficulties.

It has been an extremely challenging time to operate a business and we have endeavoured to support our families and staff team over the past 3 months. Our aim as always is to sustain our business to enable us to provide the highest standards of care and education to our clients and support our valuable staff team. Above all, the most important factor is the health and wellbeing of our Teddy’s family.

We would be most grateful if you could email or telephone to inform us of your intentions at the earliest possibility.

Thank you for your continued support.

Yours sincerely,

Justine & Andrew Cope

Directors

Early Stages Limited