Manor House Day Care - What Now?

Firstly, I wanted to wish you all a Happy Easter, on behalf of eveyone at Manor House Day Care. Whilst this particular bank holiday is like no other, I hope everyone has been able to enjoy the holiday in some small way; while we may not have the freedom’s we have previously taken for granted, we have at least had the weather! I’ve been threatening to use our blogging function for almost as long as we have had the new website live, but as yet life - and more specifically, OFSTED - just seemed to get in the way. But this seems as good a time as any to make a start, and as you can imagine, it’s been a busy few weeks for Manor House Day Care.

We watched quietly as the world around us changed, first with a focus on hygeine and then more recently with the complete erosion of day-to-day life as we know it. Today the business continues in a sort of “Manor House Day Care-Lite” capacity (you may have noticed we made a small tweak to our logo to reflect this), to enable us to answer the call to care for the children of local key workers. I am proud to say that as a small entity, we are stepping forward where many of our peers have taken a huge leap back.

I wanted to take this opportunity to give you a top-down view on what’s happening inside the Manor House, and of how we are changing the business to keep the engine ticking over, while this situation resolves itself. The Government’s insistence that we should close our doors to our wider client base, but remain open for keyworkers, was one that came as something as curveball; while I’m not ashamed to say that we had one eye firmly on a complete mothballing of the entire business and what that would mean in the mid-to-long term, we are grateful for the opportunity to make a meaningful difference to the community at this time.

If we have learned anything over the past year, it’s that nobody ever regretted being over-organised, and in the past four weeks, this has afforded us ample opportuniy to pivot the business into a nimble enterprise, able to cope with the pressures and rigours that this situation has foist upon us.

We would like to thank everyone who was kind enough to respond to our request to pay fees in April, as this has given us time to take stock of the various packages available to small businesses and what funding we may or may not be able to obtain during this period. At the tail end of March when these measures were announced, there simply was not enough time to come up with a cohesive plan that would have enabled us to make any sensible concession to the families we serve, but having had this time, we should be able to do so in the near future,.

You can rest assured that we are quietly working on a plan to pass on all the relief we can to families, and that our commitment to “non-profit” over the course this period still stands. I have said to some of you privately by email that no business can function with no business coming in, and that is still the case. But we are confident we can make use of the measures available to us to make this work in the long term. By the middle of this month, we hope to have a formal response sent to everyone via email.

Staff Response

The ability to furlough some of our staff has meant that we have been make big strides towards keeping the business operational, while maintaining positions for staff when this is all said and done. This process was conducted in conjunction with the entire team, because we didn’t want to push anyone into doing something that they perhaps weren’t comfortable with. All members of staff had the opportunity to remain in a working capacity or be furloughed on a voluntary basis. Some have loved ones who would perhaps be deemed vulnerable, so the opportunity to risk reduce at this time was an attractive prospect; and conversely, we have a core of staff who wanted to stay and work in the midst of this crisis.

In the media, there is a groundswell of support not just for the key workers of the NHS, but the cleaners, delivery drivers, supermarket staff and many others who are continuing to keep the wheels turning in this country. It easy to forget that the staff who have chosen to help keep our doors open are key workers too, and I would like to place on record my personal thanks for their hard work and commitment to making this difficult time a pleasure for those families who need us now, more than ever.

They have stepped forward not only to make this time a happy, safe and fulfilling one for these families’ children, but to make sure that there is still a Manor House Day Care for everyone when this situation resolves itself. Perhaps most honourably, they have in turn taken a decision to protect the livelihoods of their colleagues, in a situation that does not come without a degree of personal risk.

You may recall that we were due to be closed for a training week over the Easter period. With the exception of the slightly more hands-on First Aid refresher course, the staff who are not on the premises have been completing their training at home, while the those in the building are also completeing said courses. The way every single member of staff has approached this situation fills me with immense pride, and we thank them all for taking such a level-headed and committed approach to a difficult decision.

Our staff turnover is relatively low, and our opinion is that we have some of the best staff you will find anywhere in the local area, and to that end we look after them as much we can - but this is being repaid in an immeasurable way at the minute; I genuinely cannot speak highly enough of each and every member of the team.

Home Learning & Social Reconnection

We have quietly been mastering the art of delivering home learning content via the website, and you may have noticed there hasn’t been anything added since the initial body of work at the end of last month. Largely, this is because we are trying to accumulate a set of work to be able to upload at regular intervals, and hope that we can begin to do this as we come through the Easter break.

When this situation first became a reality, the staff were in the early stages of planning for next term, and then had the added difficulty of trying to adapt these plans to be deliverable as online content. We are all keeping our eyes peeled for additional fun activities to help you occupy your children at home, and we will continue to add this “curated” content to the page as well.

It was clear to us that isolation and social distancing is not just something that adults struggle with, and we have been keen to try and do something to help the children interact with their friends, and hopefully, make this time a little easier for them to deal with. The Manor House Day Care Zoom account has now been created, and before long, we will be holding regular sessions for both Nursery and Pre-School children to not only catch up with one another, but hopefully involve some form of MHDC led activity, too.

At the beginning of this, we said our aim was to continue to be a valuable resource to all of you, and that commitment still stands, too; as you can imagine, the measures above have been a relatively significant amount of time to put together, especially when condensed into three weeks, but we are breaking the back of them, and will soon be able to commit more time to doing what we do best.

Thanks

I would just like to sign off by expressing our gratitude to you, our Parents and Carers, for your patience and understanding at this time - our aim is to try and be as transparent as possible at this time, and I hope we have gone some way towards doing that. How long this will go on for, is anyone’s guess. But we will continue to do everything we can to support you at home with your children in the form of Home Learning, and to stay on top of the situation to the best of our abilities. I hope you feel that this is being demonstrated so far!

We have stepped up our game on social media, and we will continue to post stories, activities and photos as time goes on. It is my hope that when the situation presents some form of resolution, we can continue to involve the children and their work in our social media efforts more - but that will be in full consulation with you as parents. For now, I would urge you all to follow us, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram: @mnrhsedaycare is the handle for all three.

Our responsibility to you is to make sure that our doors are still open when the time comes, and that is exactly what we intend to do, by protecting the livelihood and income of our staff and ensuring the business remain solvent while we continue to care for the children of local keyworkers. So again, I thank you all for being as understanding as you have been, and I wish all of you the best in health and happiness over the weeks ahead.

Over the coming weeks, I hope to utilise this blog much more as a way of bringing the business a bit closer to you as parents and carers. Not just myself (if anything, I’d like to try and avoid it, ha!), but guest bloggers in the form of local childcare enterprises, staff - even parents - if any of you fancies writing one!? Let me know privately and I’ll explain to you how it works. The comments are on below, so at the risk of sounding like a Youtuber, please comment below (notice how I missed our the “Like and Share” bit?!). This will likely be as close to a “parent forum” as we will get for the foreseeable, so we would love to hear your feedback, thoughts, opinions; whatever! Stay safe and hopefully, we will speak soon.

Cheers,

Terry.