Greenside Community Nursery

Greenside Community Nursery has been around since 2004, and operates across two buildings within William Austin Infants School in Luton, Bedfordshire.

The road blocks

As you’d expect, the safety of the children in their care is paramount at all times. They’ve always had Health & Safety policies and procedures in place, but their struggles boiled down to everything being audited internally.

Auditing is a specialist and time-consuming task, and it was causing a lot of extra work for their employees – time that could’ve been better spent elsewhere.

Greenside Community Nursery’s management team soon realised their approach was neither time or cost-effective, and identified the need for a more efficient system, to help make sure review dates – for things like risk assessments – were never missed.

The solution

With the aim of being able to spend more time focusing on the children, and less time worrying about the red tape, Greenside Community Nursery reached out to us for help with both their Health & Safety and HR & Employment Law compliance.

We started our journey with them by sending one of our expert Health & Safety consultants to their buildings, to carry out an in-depth inspection of their nursery. After the inspection, we provided them with a detailed report – outlining specific priorities observed during the inspection, as well as the actions required to make sure they were up-to-date with current legislation.

We also set them up on our online management platform – Atlas, where they could simplify anything from risk assessments to employee training, to streamline their Health & Safety responsibilities.

When they joined us, Greenside Community Nursery took out our HR & Employment Law service too. With this, they got a visit from one of our experienced experts, who visited their premises, reviewed their current processes and supplied every single employee with a contract of employment and employee handbook.

With both our Health & Safety and HR & Employment Law services, they were given access to our 24/7 advice line, so that they were never more than a call away from industry-leading experts.

How we helped

In 2011, for the very first time, Greenside Community Nursery received an ‘outstanding’ rating for Health & Safety issues in their Ofsted inspection.

Beverley Thompson, Managing Director of the nursery, said: “The Ofsted inspector was greatly impressed with the systems we have in place – in particular for Health & Safety. The online system has the best risk assessments I have ever seen and it really helps us to ensure a safe environment for our children.

“We also use Citation’s Employment Law services which provides me with reassurance that I have 24/7 advice from a specialist, should I need it.”