Managing your nursery operations
In this series of blogs, National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA) provides top tips on developing effective nursery leadership and management skills. The articles address each important aspect of leadership and management in a nursery. We also provide links to where you can find further training and information.
Why are nursery leadership and management skills important?
Effective nursery leadership and management skills are crucial to running a successful early years settings. If a nursery is strong in this area, it will lead to a happy and high performing team, good inspection outcomes, and most importantly, better outcomes for the children.
For instance, in England, the Ofsted Early Years Inspection Handbook states that inspectors will consider the effectiveness of leadership and management in their judgement. To be considered “Good”, the nursery must (among other things) demonstrate that leaders have a clear and ambitious vision for providing high-quality, inclusive care and education to all. Leaders have effective systems in place for the supervision and support of staff. Leaders engage with their staff and are aware of the main pressures on them.
Our Leadership and Management articles will cover:
- What makes an effective nursery leader?
- How to build and lead your nursery team
- Managing people
- Managing nursery operations.
Part 4 – managing nursery operations
In part 4, we look at how nursery managers can build effective arrangements for managing the operations within their nursery.
What does “managing nursery operations” mean?
In a nursery context, operations management is concerned with utilising the premises, staff and other resources as efficiently as possible to create a quality childcare service, while making sure that the business continues to be sustainable.
To be effective at managing nursery operations, a leader needs to have the following:
- The ability to work as part of a team, but also to use their own initiative when finding solutions to problems that arise.
- Good organisational skills, to bring together the various systems and processes to maximum efficiency.
- Strong knowledge and understanding of the IT systems within the organisation, to ensure these are up to date and used appropriately to support the business.
- Strong communication and presentation skills, to present information to senior leaders and to ensure that information-sharing is ongoing and effective between different parts of the childcare setting.
Develop and implement a nursery operational plan
An operational plan is a basic tool that directs the day-to-day activities of people within the organisation. All staff should be aware of the existence of the operational plan, what its purpose is and why it is important to them. The operational plan sets out the detailed activities that support the nursery’s strategy and business plan. It also helps individuals to set objectives for their job role. In strong organisations, there is a ‘golden thread’ that connects the strategic plan to the business plan and then runs through to individual objectives. While an childcare setting’s strategic plan shares its vision for the future over the next few years, the operational plan usually runs for a year and lays out how the organisation will achieve its strategy on a daily to weekly basis.
A simple operational plan will include:
- The overall business objective that covers this aspect of the plan – for example, an overall objective for the nursery might be ‘to increase occupancy by 20% in the next three years’
- The specific actions that will be taken to meet that overall objective to increase nursery occupancy towards that overall target
- The target date for completion of the activity
- The budget (if appropriate) for the activity
- The person or team responsible for the delivery of the activity
- Progress towards achievement – you can review and update this regularly, and use it to report to senior managers on progress with delivery.
Operational systems to use at your nursery
Most nurseries will use some or all of the below operational systems:
- Financial systems, including payment systems
- Systems for recording children’s personal details
- Systems for recording staff personal details
- Rota and shift processes within the nursery
- Systems for recording daily attendance, accidents and incidents and so on
- Processes for planning, observation and assessments of children’s learning and development
- Systems and processes for interactions with parents.
What does efficiency mean for your nursery?
In a business context, the word ‘efficient’ is generally used to describe the process of getting the maximum outputs from the minimum inputs. To use an example in a nursery, using your staff efficiently means that you are allocating staff resources across the nursery with the least waste of time, effort, money and energy. You can use your total staff allocation in a variety of ways, so you should ensure that you use them in the best possible way.
How do you know you are managing nursery operations effectively?
The word ‘effective’ refers to the extent to which something has been done to achieve the targeted outcome. For example, how close is the business to achieving its expressed goals? Effectiveness is usually measured in the longer term, whereas efficiency has a shorter-term perspective – it is more about the ‘here and now’. Therefore, you should know if the nursery is achieving its sustainability targets or that you are managing costs to agreed levels.
Are there any systems in your nursery that you think could work more efficiently? For example, do your current staff rota and room systems enable you to maximise your use of staff for minimum cost, without compromising on quality? Make notes of any systems that you think you could revise to make them work more efficiently. Take your ideas to your next management team or staff meeting.
Develop your knowledge further, by undertaking NDNA’s online course, free to NDNA members: Effective Leadership and Management, or our Live Virtual Classroom course, Leadership and Management.
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