Sorry for the long post but I am incensed by the way my colleagues and I are treated in our roles as nursery nurses and this might help people see why the cleaning gets done in nurseries whilst the children are still there.
I work in a nursery. To reduce costs they have been whittling our hours down to the bare minimum. I am contracted to work 4 x 10 hour days, 8am to 6pm. I am now paid from 8am until the time the last child in my care leaves. I had originally been told I would be paid any extra hours needed to do the cleaning as we have no cleaner. The last child to leave is a 9 month old baby. Today the manager was looking after him whilst I cleaned the baby room. I vacuumed and mopped. His Mum collected him early, at 4.15pm. At that point the doors were open and all toys and small items of furniture raised off floor to allow for mopping. The manager said I had to leave now as she was locking up; as we wouldn't get paid for any time after the baby left (4.15pm) despite the fact that my agreed hours today were until 5.30pm.
So I left the nursery at 4.30pm which is when they will pay me to. On Monday both myself and the baby arrive at 8am. He will have to sit in his cot whilst I put away the mop and bucket, his pushchair, put all the furniture and rugs back in place then go and boil his drinking water for the day and do the daily risk assessments.
My two colleagues look after the 2, 3 and 4 year olds. They didn't get any time today to do their planning paperwork for next week. So they had to take it all home to complete over the weekend. Thankfully I got mine done today as in the baby room you get the odd half hour at naptime. One of my colleagues is an apprentice nursery nurse working 40 hours per week and being paid £90 per week. She has a level 2 qualification and is doing an apprenticeship to work towards her level 3. She does more or less the same work as the other NN and myself who are both Level 3 qualified. In 5 weeks she has received one hour training from her Learn Direct tutor who is meant to be overseeing her training.
We also have no cook. So the nursery staff have to prepare all meals and snacks and do the washing up. When this happens we are short on ratio staff as there is no additional staff to cover for this and the kitchen is the opposite end of the building to the nursery.
So you can see that private nurseries are using all sorts of cost cutting methods; many of which adversely affect the care provided to children; this is no fault of the staff however.
I was a child minder for 23 years and I know that the children in my are received a much higher level of care than those in the nursery I work in. But the parents think that because it is a private nursery they are getting superior care. They see all the paperwork which extols the virtues of the nursery and says how high the standards are. They say they use locally sourced food. In our nursery that means it comes in a tin or out of a ready meal packet from the local supermarket round the corner