November 2021

13 Buckden Roundabout November 2021 ‘ Support our Buckden Businesses ’, will be an ongoing feature. If you are a local business and are interested in being included, please reach out to the Roundabout team via the contact details on page 3. Following last month ’ s feature on Hardwick Dene we are going to the other end of the age spectrum this time to find out more about Early Years Learning providers. Again, we ’ re very fortunate in the village to have multiple options in this area from Buckden Preschool, several childminders, and this month ’ s interviewees Buckden Day Nursery. We caught up with Heidi the General Manager of the nursery group and Grace the Deputy Manager of Buckden to find out more … Tell me about Buckden Day Nursery It originally opened at Buckden Towers and quickly outgrew the space and moved to this building around 17 years ago, a couple of years later it was bought by Jane the current owner. At the time it was her first nursery but now the group, Da- vidson Roberts Ltd, has nine nurseries all within around a 30 min radius of Buckden. Here at Buckden Day Nursery, we take children from birth to 5 years and currently have 120 children on roll who attend vari- ous sessions throughout the week, with a staffing team of 30. Broadly speaking the children are broken into four age brack- ets, birth to 20 months, then up to 2 years, 2 - 3 and finally pre- school which is 3 - 5. We ’ ve got a brilliant team here at BDN and have been ex- tremely fortunate to have great continuity over the 15 years with a lot of long serving staff members. Keeley, the Nursery manager was actually an apprentice when Jane first bought the nursery. Do you have a particular philosophy to the early years learn- ing you provide? We follow the Curiosity Approach and are currently working towards our accreditation. This approach was created in the UK and takes inspiration from early childhood education theo- ries such as Reggio, Steiner and Montessori. Our main setting ethos is creating a home from home environ- ment in which children feel comfortable and confident to learn. The Curiosity Approach aims to inspire awe and wonder in children, by allowing them to explore and develop their ex- isting interests. This supports their independent and creative thinking, problem solving, and social communication skills. We are currently in the process of creating a portfolio of evi- dence to showcase the work we have done. As a company we are keen to secure our accreditation across all Davidson Rob- erts Ltd settings. If someone wants to work in a nursery setting, how does the qualification process work? There are different ways, but often people will start as an ap- prentice which means they come into the nursery setting as a trainee and combine hands on nursery experience with study. There are various levels to the qualifications you can achieve right the way up to degree level or Early Years Teacher Status. We feel it is important to have a well - qualified workforce to allow us deliver high quality care and early years education for our children. We are very fortunate here at Buckden that both Keeley (manager) and Grace (deputy manager) hold the Early Years Teacher qualification. Can you tell me about your chef Susan and her approach at the nursery? Susan is a fully qualified chef who works here five days a week. She makes all of the food for the children from scratch and whilst she has a philosophy of ‘ everything in moderation ’ there is no added sugar or salt in her food so it ’ s all nutritionally ap- propriate for 0 - 5 year olds. She has a 5 - star rating from environmental health and is able to deal with any allergies or dietary requirements that the chil- dren have which can be very wide ranging. She also sources all our fruit and veg locally which is something we like to do as much as possible. How has it been running a nursery through a global pandem- ic? In a nutshell, a HUGE learning curve!! Back at the start of the original lock down we closed completely for five weeks while we figured out processes and procedures. We took the guid- ance from Public Health England and Cambridge County Coun- cil were brilliant at keeping in touch with us and were always at the end of the phone if we needed them. After that initial 5 weeks we opened to key worker and vulner- able children which equated to around 10 children in total. Some nurseries closed completely so we did have some key worker children come to us from other nursery settings tempo- rarily. In June we then re - opened with a reduced capacity (50%), but to start with we only had 20 children as parents were generally still feeling pretty cautious. It gradually increased from there and we were pretty much back to full capacity from last Sept. It was a bit of a juggling act to ensure we were bringing enough staff back from furlough at the times we needed them but the team were absolutely amazing in the way they handled the whole thing, as were the parents who were incredibly sup- portive and understanding. Are you fully ‘ back to normal ’ at this stage or have there been any lasting changes? We still have some precautions in place such as limiting visitors into the setting. Parents used to come into the nursery and drop their children off in their respective rooms whereas now we use different entrances for each of the age groups and hand overs are at the door with parents and staff wearing masks. (Continued on page 16) Support Buckden Businesses