Today is the anniversary of the first lockdown – in case you hadn’t heard already! Last week, when Cheltenham races went ahead without an audience, it brought back memories of a very different picture the previous year. There was a rising sense of incredulity, dread, even panic, in the air as we watched hospitals in Italy filling up while we in Britain were still jostling together, unmasked, at sporting events. At that time, scientific advisors and government ministers were still talking about building herd immunity and keeping the virus at bay by washing our hands for twenty seconds. Sing Happy Birthday or choose your own song while you do it. We know now that that was never going to be enough. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Then, everything changed as we were told to “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. We were encountering our first experience of lockdown; a new word to sum up our times and a new way of living. On 23rd March we closed most of our nurseries, keeping only Horfield, Broadwood, Weston and, later, Shirehampton open for vulnerable children and the children of key workers. Most of our employees were put on furlough while we asked for volunteers from the team to man the open nurseries.

The practicalities of the situation were immense. In the nurseries that were mothballed – and we didn’t know for how long – we deep-cleaned, turned off power, emptied fridges and freezers. Meanwhile we still had children to feed and care for in the open nurseries. We transferred the food we’d rescued to avoid wasting it and because Lovejoys, our food supplier, were forced to furlough. Our Sainsbury’s weekly shopping slots were unobtainable so switching to them for all our food was impossible and that is also where we source nappies and wipes! Our directors scoured supermarkets for supplies suffering frosty stares and even verbal abuse from people accusing them of stockpiling.

We asked for guidance on safe operating procedures but eventually did our own thing to fill the information vacuum. As it turned out, much later, the official advice could have been lifted from our own SOPs. And, of course, the financial implications were immense. We had no reassurance that our funding would be honoured by Local Authorities at the time and, in any case, funding is only one part of our income. The furlough system was a huge relief and enabled us to stay afloat and, unlike many other childcare providers, we managed not to charge parents to retain places.

So, then we settled into two months of lockdown. Recognising the need to keep in touch and provide children and families at home with some continuity, we issued timetables, shared activity ideas, recipes and videos – remember our Clap for Carers and Easter Hop compilations? Our Quality and Training Manager, Anna Gent, returned from furlough to organise all this and also offered “Ask Anna” a hotline for advice on behaviour, sleep, education, feeding … anything that individual families found challenging.

Then came June, when we reopened to everyone. Gradually we returned to a new landscape of bubbles, sanitiser, extreme hand washing, isolation, quarantine, travel corridors, queuing, zooming, testing and tracing. Our Compliance Manager, Hayley, became our Covid Tsar tasked with keeping on top of government directives that changed almost daily. We know the government had lots on its plate, but nurseries were left to negotiate the landscape with little support. Unlike schools, over 80% of nursery providers are privately owned and complying with test and trace with no financial support had huge implications. Every test and trace contact or positive test result meant isolations and closures. We kept our bubble system to contain any outbreaks and protect our health, but also to keep the nurseries viable for everyone. Many, many providers have folded under the strain.

Despite all these challenges, we are proud that Snapdragons hasn’t just ticked over, but has grown. In November, we opened our Cribbs Causeway nursery, two months later than scheduled and two months before the next lockdown. Of course, it was never our vision to launch a new build nursery during the first pandemic in a hundred years! No open days, no parents allowed into the setting, no launch party. But we’ve been blown away by the trust and faith of our new parents and the Cribbs Causeway Snappy family is growing steadily. Maybe we’ll get to have an opening celebration in the summer. You never know.

The addition of Cribbs Causeway to our family has had the unexpected effect of bringing us into the Nursery World Top 25 Chains directory! This is a national rating of the largest nursery groups based on the amount of places offered and places us eighth in the country for our collective Ofsted results. What makes this very special to us is, almost without exception, the other groups in the list have grown by acquisitions and mergers, whereas Snapdragons has grown organically, powered by reputation, local demand, great staff and our wonderful families.

We’ve also gathered two national awards this year. We are the best place for babies and toddlers, according to the Nursery World Awards, due to our training, environments, 360 audits and Under Twos inductions which give all our staff the in-depth knowledge and empathy they need to care for our youngest children. And Anna Gent was runner up for NMT Personality of the Year based on the amazing work she did during the lockdown as well as her innovative approach to professional development training.

We have evolved our planning to be a more agile system which allows for planning “in the moment” and our parents have already started to feed back to us that this is working really well for them.

Meanwhile, we’ve continued rolling out The Curiosity Approach, first accredited to Snapdragons Atworth, to all the nurseries; Weston has achieved a valued Millie’s Mark accreditation, a heightened level of first aid assurance which ensures that ALL staff are first aid trained, no matter what their role. - more details of this will be another news post – and this will be coming to all our nurseries soon. And very soon there will be exciting news of how we are engaging our children in their rights and those of children across the world. After all, you’re never too young to have a sense of your place in the world and stand up for it.

We asked all our families to complete a COVID-19 questionnaire to gauge how they feel about us after this strange, distanced year. All the comments have been fed back to our teams and they are enjoying reading them. We had hundreds of responses and were overwhelmed with the support and positivity that came back. The fact that “keep doing what you’re doing” was a recurring theme shows us that we’re on the right track. We thank our families for honestly completing our questionnaire and for being with us through this very strange year.