The more consumers pay, the more they expect. But how does that work in a private nursery setting? Kate Timms shares her thoughts…
Having worked across higher education, independent schools and now early years for more years than I care to admit, I’ve seen student and parental expectations become steadily more transactional.
Since the 1997 Dearing report identified students as “customers”, English universities have invested heavily in marketing, branding and the student experience.
Independent schools have followed a similar path, though the trigger was generational rather than financial.
Early years sits at the sharp end of this same trajectory. Families increasingly want reassurance that they’re receiving value for money.
This can be challenging for providers, though. When the customer is always right, how do we stay true to what is right for the child? And can the two really meet in the middle?
Sector commentary this year describes UK childcare as entering one of its most transformative periods. Parents are becoming markedly more discerning. They’re judging a setting on far more than safety and curriculum, right down to values, inclusivity and community feel.
And because our “customers” can’t yet speak for themselves, parents feel the stakes even more acutely than school or university parents do.
As leaders in early years, there’s little point in hoping that things go back to the way they used to be. That ship has sailed.
Our best option is to try to understand who our new demographic really is. Doing so will allow us to:
We need to continually communicate value in a way parents understand. We also need to build processes that are frictionless, ensuring the information they receive is accurate and consistent, whichever staff member or channel they use.
None of this is glamorous. However, it’s what makes the difference to whether parents feel they are genuinely receiving value for the fees they pay.
Marcus Buckingham makes a similar case in his recent book Design Love In. The connection people feel toward an organisation isn’t accidental – it’s designed, built deliberately into everyday interactions and small moments.
Applied to early years, that might mean the very intentional, individual feedback given to parents at the end of a busy day, or a parent survey that visibly changes what a setting does rather than being cherrypicked for marketing messages.
Parents can tell the difference between a survey run to generate a score and one that’s actually shaping decisions.
Get the personalisation and the process right, and you’ve built an experience families want to stay for.
The most effective shift I’ve seen work in any sector is moving from reactive to proactive. Tell parents what to expect before they even have to ask.
In an early years context, that might mean explaining developmentally why your curriculum is built a certain way, or how you manage room transitions. This is before a parent encounters that situation and forms their own view of it.
Proactive communication around the quality of your provision cuts the volume of individual queries a setting has to field. It reframes the relationship as one of expertise and partnership, rather than one of service on demand.
Every setting receives unreasonable demands sooner or later – the bespoke settling-in schedule that would unravel the whole room’s routine, or a parent’s view on sleep patterns.
Research conducted by the EAB’s Independent School Executive Forum offers a useful reframe: don’t build your systems around the small, vocal minority of consistently dissatisfied parents.
Their own estimate puts 70–75% of parents as reasonable, fair-minded people who simply want clarity and evidence that their concerns have been heard.
Build policy around the loudest voices, and you risk eroding standards and goodwill for everyone else.
The real skill is distinguishing quickly between a legitimate concern expressed forcefully and a genuinely unreasonable demand, then holding a boundary with confidence once identified, grounded in sound pedagogical reasoning.
That confidence needs to sit with staff as much as leadership. A key person who can explain, calmly, why a particular approach to weaning or nap transitions is in a child’s best interest – rather than simply complying to avoid conflict – is worth more to a setting’s culture than any policy document.
Just as prospective students research universities and independent schools through league tables and social proof, parents now research nurseries almost entirely through review platforms before they ever walk through the door.
Daynurseries.co.uk alone hosts reviews for more than 15,000 UK nurseries and upwards of 250,000 parent reviews.
Layered on top is a newer shift: answer engine optimisation, or AEO – how AI tools summarise and recommend a setting when a parent asks a conversational question, often without visiting a website at all.
Brand and reputation now need to be legible not just to a parent reading a webpage but also to an algorithm synthesising an answer on their behalf, drawing on everything from Ofsted reports to review sentiment.
Parents increasingly arrive at their first visit having already formed a view, shaped by strangers’ reviews and an AI-generated summary of them. Therefore, the experience our parents have with us becomes ever more important.
All this talk of parent experience doesn’t mean bending pedagogical standards to fit consumer expectation.
It means recognising and intentionally leaning into the notion that trust now has to be actively built and continually demonstrated, not merely assumed by virtue of professional authority.
The settings that manage this best treat parents as informed partners: proactive, confident in holding boundaries, deliberate about designing the parent experience, and using feedback as insight rather than threat.
Getting this balance right takes a clear understanding of what makes your setting special and being organisationally self-confident about your expertise, while also building empathy into your operating model.
Parents are changing, and probably therefore so should we.
1 Make communication easy – use systems that filter the noise. Don’t bombard parents with too many messages; make it quick and easy for them to understand whether they need to take action or if this is a “nice-to-have” update.
2 Explain the “why” before parents have to ask. Share the reasoning and your expertise behind sleep, food and outdoor time before they’re challenged.
3 Design for the reasonable majority. Build your policy around the 75% of fair-minded parents, not the loudest few.
4 Use feedback to change what you do, not just score it. Parents notice when survey results are cherry-picked and genuine actions are not taken. Don’t waste their time if you’re not willing to change.
5 Get your online house in order. If reviews, AI summaries and word of mouth shape opinions more than ever, make sure you’re giving your parents something to genuinely shout about.
Kate Timms is head of business development at Fennies Nurseries.
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