A parent visits three nurseries. She looks at the rooms, the garden, the equipment and the displays, and she asks about hours and fees.
She does not ask how long the staff have been there, what the turnover has been, who her child's key person would be, or what happens when somebody is on holiday.
Those four questions would tell her considerably more about the quality of care than everything she did look at, and nobody suggested them.
Ask 1: what ratios do you actually operate at
Not the minimum requirement. What the room genuinely runs at on an ordinary day, which is sometimes better than the minimum and should be stated either way.
Ask 2: what happens during breaks and lunch
Ratios must be maintained, and how a setting covers breaks tells you a great deal about how it is staffed and managed.
Ask 3: what happens when somebody is off
Bank staff, agency cover or redeployment from another room. Consistency of faces is what matters to a child and cover arrangements determine it.
Ask 4: what has the turnover been
How many staff have left the child's room in the past year. This is the single most revealing question a parent can ask and almost nobody asks it.
Ask 5: how long has the room leader been here
Experience and continuity in the room your child will be in, rather than across the whole setting.
Ask 6: who would my child's key person be
Named, met before starting, and what their role involves. A key person a parent has met changes the whole experience of leaving a child.
Ask 7: what happens if the key person leaves
How it is handled, how a child is transitioned and who takes over. This happens and how a setting manages it matters.
Ask 8: what qualifications do the staff hold
Across the room rather than the headline. A setting with one qualified person and several unqualified is different from one with a qualified team.
Ask 9: what training do staff receive
Ongoing, beyond the minimum, and in what. This indicates whether the setting invests in its people, which is what produces retention.
Ask 10: how are staff supported
Supervision, planning time and how workload is managed. Settings that look after staff keep them, and keeping them is what a parent is buying.
Ask 11: what happens at transitions between rooms
When a child moves up, how it is managed and how long it takes. Transitions unsettle children and good settings plan them carefully.
Ask 12: how do you communicate with parents
Daily, weekly, an application or a conversation at the door. Parents differ in what they want and settings rarely ask.
Ask 13: what are the settling arrangements
Which is where all of this becomes visible, and is the ground in settling in questions anxious parents ask and settling in and first week questions from parents.
Publish the staffing answers before anybody visits
An assistant that answers the ratio question, explains the key person system, describes cover arrangements and states how communication works gives a parent the information they would not have known to ask for, at the hour they are researching. The same staffing questions arise in staffing and service style questions clients ask, and the vendor scrutiny in ai chatbot security questions to ask a vendor. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under childcare.