Just to clarify, a nursery- not a nursery that’s part of a school, it’s a family owned nursery?
I work in a prep which has a nursery as part of the school which has an early years teacher - I’m assuming this is not what you’re doing. Please obviously correct me.
Is it all year round or a term time only nursery / job?
The fact that’s it’s a private business means that they don’t have to stick to the Teacher Pay Scale. So in all reality your pay will likely not rise either - it will stay as it is with minor increases here and there. Private schools don’t have to use the main pay scale and a family run nursery doesn’t have to.
The budget will likely be tight. Many children will be on funded hours. You should be aware of this and the general budget issues around the 30 / 15 hours as you negotiate. They won’t be part of the TPS either.
The feel of the place would also be what’s important to me. This would be the case anywhere!
Not so much red flags, but I would be finding out is:
Are all the children in all week long? Or can they choose sessions? (In which case you’ll have some children there all week all day, some only in the morning, some you’ll see once a week etc) - this will affect your planning. You’ll likely have to repeat.
Are you going to be responsible for the whole setting as a teacher - just the preschool, just the preschool and toddlers?
In line with that, say there’s 30 children in the preschool, are you having a Key Group or are you going to be planning, assessing and working with all 30?
Ive worked in two day nurseries and admittedly we never had an employed teacher. We all had a key group and virtually no time out at all to do work (did it in lunch break) because ratio requirements are high.
So are you going to be teaching a lesson (say a phonics session) to the whole lot and then being “free” when the children are doing free flow / key worker time or are you part of that too?
So you need to establish if, as your employment title is teacher as opposed to Early Years Practitioner which most nursery staff are, do the teacher rules for PPA time apply to you (which I think is 10%).
Nursery jobs are quite domestic - lots of cleaning involved (cleaner not guaranteed) possible food prep, washing up and nappy changing etc. Clarify whether this is part of your role or not.
And this I suppose is how you negotiate - if your being employed to teach a full EY curriculum to the whole preschool and doing all the journals and assessing etc then that is very different to being a teacher to help with ratios and teaching one little lesson a day and then being like a standard practitioner if you get me.
Red flags would be standard as anywhere - safeguarding, general treatment of the children, attitudes - go with your gut on it all.
Tips:
Some of them will have an attention span of ten seconds! Quick and fast and lots of interaction.
Go on Pinterest for lots of amazing phonics and Number activities - there’s hundreds of ways to learn letters and numbers and practice formation. Fishing for letters in water and putting them together to make real words / nonsense words for example.
Movement breaks - look up The Learning Station on YouTube or if there’s no interactive whiteboard look for music that can be used.
Run with their interests. Plan around interests. They’re all loving animals? Go with it!
Remember that everything just takes that bit longer than secondary school and much of the time you just really have to go back to basics. I did whole sessions practising putting coats on! Never assume something so simple is something they know.
School preparation - parents will love you for it. We came up with a little “school” for school starters from the summer term - gave it a name and just practised school. Changing and doing PE (asked everyone to bring in a PE kit) , did some little lessons a bit more formally each day, got some school uniform for the dressing up…..
Best of luck, I love working in early years