Private Nursery or move to school nursery?

[Alexahelp]

My DD is a September birthday and turning 3 this year. I am currently weighing up whether to move her to a nursery adjacent to her primary next Sept when she turns 4 (due to waiting lists I need to ideally decide in the next few months)

Her current nursery will have very limited kids in it going to her school and I worry that it will be too young a class for her once heading into the year before school - it’s a fairly small setting. However her sister will be starting there in Jan post my mat leave so two drop offs required. She is also on the shy side and I don’t want unnecessary change - and she’s content there.

The primary nursery is ofsted excellent, a direct feeder to her primary and would work out cheaper - but we’d have to cover the majority of school holidays and manage two drop offs. She could however benefit from being with her peers going into reception…

What would you do?

We left our daughter at the nursery she was at as felt like 2 moves in 2 years would be a lot.

she met a friend on the first transition day and all went smoothly.

I think a majority of schools have a class made of children coming from a variety of settings.

How will you manage the early pick-up and school holidays? And does the after-school club take little ones?

We kept ours at private day nursery as we couldn't mange the holidays between us - all the holiday clubs around here are for school-age children. The after-school club does take a few nursery children but there was a waiting list, so even if we'd moved him we'd still have been picking him up at 3.15pm, which wasn't feasible.

He's starting school in September, so we'll see how it goes! There's one kid going from his nursery but not one he plays with much. From the open day it seems like at least half the year are coming from elsewhere, and they do lots of settling in sessions.

We had this dilemma.
for practical reasons more than anything left him at private nursery (where his brother alsoattended). The 3pm picks ups and lack of school holiday cover made it very difficult for us. He started in reception as one of the youngest, is now y5, no regrets.

that said once ds1 was at the school it made practical sense to have ds2 there too so we moved him to the school nursery before he joined reception (by that point as he was a sibling we were more confident about him getting into the main school)

We just had this dilemma and decided to move our DD from her private nursery to the pre-school attached to what will be her school next September. It'll mean 2 drop offs for the next year until DD2 can start at the same nursery/pre-school but we thought having a year to bond with her cohort was worth making the move so she's not starting late in Reception next year and they'll all have already formed friendships.

We had this dilemma last year and kept DS at his nursery. The practical implications of moving him were a nightmare. I was worried that it would put him at a disadvantage when starting Reception particularly as half his new class will know each other but his new teacher has said that there is really very little difference when they start school and within a couple of weeks, they forget who was at nursery there and who was somewhere else.

I only have 1 DC, so not quite the same as you. We kept DC at the nursery she was at as she was settled there. The pre school attached to the primary school DC is at. The pre school was term time only, and hours are 9am-2.45, so no use to us at all, DC was the only child from her nursery going there. The reception teacher said from the 28 in her class, there were 16 different pre school/nursery settings

this is reassuring! The social aspect is really my main worry.

Thanks for experiences everyone. The school nursery does full wraparound and some holiday clubs in summer/Easter so leaves us with a more manageable amount of holiday time to cover, so it’s doable, but I would like one more year of term time holidays without using up all annual leave…

I think it’d be a lot easier to leave her where she is, but the geography of where we live means all our estates kids get funnelled into this one, thankfully excellent, primary so just don’t want to do
her over.