2008 Employer of the Year Small business (10 – 49 employees) - Ark Day Nursery
Jo Brock
Employer of the Year Small business
Employer – Ark Day Nursery
Learning Provider – Calderdale College
Heidi is seen walking through the corridor of the nursery
Jo says “The Ark started back in 2002, Heidi and myself both had young children, and we couldn’t find what we wanted for our children. So we decided to set up our own.”
Heidi is sat with some children at a table
Heidi says “What we were trying to get our head around was how a parent feels and what a parent wants for their child.” Heidi and Jo are seen working in the office. “We are using our business expertise in the nursery sector, which is very different.”
Jo says “We want to raise the profile of childcare; we want the quality and standards to be raised.”
Heidi says “Jo and I love learning; we believe it makes you look inwardly and see where you need to improve.”
We see the staff interacting with the children in the nursery. “We have staff here who would never have gone on a training course and would have been horrified of the thought of turning up and going to college. And now they do, they achieve, they feel brilliant about themselves, everybody comes back, then they want to go on, the next person then wants to start the training course and it really does work like that.”
We see an apprentice working online with Jo
Jo says “The college approached us about the possibility of running an academy here, and having apprentices actually doing their learning at the Ark. This is somewhere were people can come and have high quality training. Ofsted tell us that we are really good, we want to continue doing that, we want to strive to be the very very best.”
Heidi is interacting with children in the nursery
Heidi says “We started very small, there were only four employees and about 10 children. Now six years later we’ve got up to 250 children, 45 employees. Ofsted require us to have 50% of the staff qualified, we run it at about 80-90%.”
We see Heidi leaving for the day
Heidi says “We are both really proud of what we’ve done. The only thing we don’t get time to do is sit back and reflect very often.”
Ark Day Nursery, finalist for the Small Employer of the Year Award at the Apprenticeship Awards 2008.