High turnover of staff in nursery - would you be concerned?

[ceebee74]

DS (20 mo) has been going to nursery 3 days a week for over a year now. He seems to really enjoy going and has a great time whilst he is there (in fact I think he enjoys it much more than the 2 days he spends at home with me ).

However, the nursery does seem to have a high turnover of staff - I can only think of 5 nursery nurses (out of about 12ish) that are there now that were there when DS started - there seems to be new faces in there all the time which I find quite disconcerting (although it doesn't seem to phase DS at all). He is on his 6th key worker since he started which seems to defeat the object of key workers .

I realise that there are a few nursery nurses on placement and there is no way of distingushing these but I am not comfortable with the frequent change of staff.

Is this normal for nurseries?

Do you know why staff are leaving?

I personally think its poor management if your child has had 6keyworkers. As you say this defeats the point of keyworkers.

If theres a member of staff that you get on really well with I'd suggest gentle quizing her. It might be as simple as staff been able to get better pay or higher level jobs else where, rather than something wrong with the nursery. But definately worth investigating.

No, shouldn't be like this. I'd speak to the nursery manager about it, just in a casual way.
At both nurseries that DS has been to (we moved area), the staff were very settled, apart from obvious things like maternity leave. At his first nursery only one person left in a year, and that was because it was a long commute for her and something had come up close to home. He's only had 3 keyworkers in 16 months, and thats with a change of nurseries and a change of rooms when promoted to toddlers.

Were they all paid staff? A lot of Nurseries rely on student placements to make up numbers. A high turnover doesn't sound good but doesn't mean the children are being neglected. Nursery Nurses work long hours for poor pay and the paperwork side is absolutely ridiculous these days. I work part-time in a pre-school and have to take paperwork home to complete it. If I worked full time I'd have twice as much paperwork and half as many hours to do it for what is a pittance in my case. Can you ask the Manager what is going on? At least you son isn't being unsettled by it all which is good.

I don't know why staff are leaving - I never see the manager and there is no-one else really senior around to ask when I drop/pick DS up.

A new nursery opened down the road about 4 months ago and it has clearly had an impact on DS's nursery as they do not have the same number of children in that they used to - they can take 18 0-2 year olds but they currently only have 11 - so maybe they are making redundancies?

I guess I am also annoyed as we are not told that staff are leaving - they are just not there anymore and new ones appear who don't introduce themselves.

I would be worried. I lasted 3 months at a nursery because the staff were so awful - one looked at a crying 3 year old who'd bumped himself and said, "Good, now you know why you don't run indoors" and I was left unsupervised (underqualified) while my colleagues gave each other pedicures in the back room.

When I raised concerns I was pretty much bullied and faced sarky comments every day, and so on. Another member of staff left within a month of me. We were both out sharpish after handing in our notice (ie out the door within a week) without the parents or children being told as "it unsettles parents"

It should do, if they knew what was going on. The general level of agression between staff members.

I'm not saying this is happening at your nursery, hopefully it's not, but having a chat with a member of staff you trust about the atmosphere in the team would be quite enlightening, I suspect.

I find that quite worrying. In ds's 2 (his old and his new) nurseries, there are a few that come and go, but about 75-80% have been there for years and years.

I would find it worrying. One of the things I particularly like about DS's nursery is the low turnover. If staff leave at all it's generally because they are going to jobs as nannies or emigrating, and a couple of the women who also babysit for DS have said that they eouldn't consider working at any other nursery after this one.