Nursery security

[nurseryqs]

My child's nursery have recently changed their security arrangements, and I am after some opinions on whether the new arrangement is secure enough.

The nursery is set around a courtyard where the children play outside a lot of the time, they are usually outside at pick up time unless it is raining. Children are supervised, but staff can be quite distracted talking to other parents at this time.

There used to be two entry gates between the street and the courtyard and now there is only one. It is about 4ft high. Parents have a key, and need to lock it behind themselves with the same key.

My concerns are that a child could quite easily get out and run into the road, or (less likely) an adult could snatch a child over the fence.

Does this sound OK to others?

I wouldn't be happy with any access what so ever from the garden by anyone. The only people I would expect to have a key to a gate is the nursery staff for emergencies.

I might be being OTT, but I would expect entrance only through the nursery building and out the back door

That sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

Thanks for the replies. Because of the nursery setup the access has to be through the garden. I was fine with it when there were two gates. The outer one was full height, with a door. If a child managed to run out of the inner gate then they would get stuck at the second one. Now that there is only one gate I feel very nervous about it.

I wouldn't be happy with parents controlling the way in/out. At dd's nursery only staff are allowed to open the door, surely that's the case for most nurseries? What if a parent forgot to lock the gate behind them?

I agree I especially don't like the idea of all parents having their own key. Relying on them to lock it behind themselves afterwards and not accidentally let another child out.

I wouldn't like that - they could be copying the key, passing it to anyone, but more importantly a nursery age kid could stand on a toy and climb over a 4 foot gate! If there's two gates then I'd be less bothered about people having keys to one.

That sounds insane. How has this been allowed to happen? Who has made the decision and why?

Thanks for the replies.

The outer gate was broken for a while and we were told that it was being fixed. Yesterday I spoke to the manager about it and she said that they aren't going to replace it, for financial reasons. I said that I was unhappy, but she seemed to think that I was overreacting. I think I am going to put it in writing, and suggest that they have some kind of buzzer system for the outer gate.