ABSTRACT

A nursery manager is concerned with the needs of three main, separate, but interrelated groups of people. These are the children, their parents and the staff who are employed. However, increasingly the nursery manager is accountable not to her/himself (as owner) but rather to a management board that has responsibility for the ultimate feasibility and quality of the service provided.This may be a formal board of directors, or where Children’s Centres are attached to schools this will be the school governors. For a voluntary sector setting, those with management responsibility will be the trustees of the charity that funds the nursery; and in the case of workplace nurseries, the ‘steering group’ will be determined by the employer that sponsors the provision. Unless the nursery manager is the owner of the setting, he/she will have delegated responsibility from the management board and will need to be clear about the level of authority he/she is assumed to have.This is important not just for day-to-day operational efficiency, but also so that parents and others contracted to the nursery (e.g. as suppliers) understand what to expect from the manager, and when they should refer to the management board. It is even more critical to clarify the manager’s responsibility and level of delegated decision-making if nurseries are established through the collaboration of two or more organisations. For example, where a Children’s Centre is part of a cluster servicing a community, it may be housed in one school but offering places to parents using several schools for older children: which set of governors is the higher authority, and what part does the local education authority play? Nurseries now no longer have a single point of reference: they are held to account by a number of stakeholders.An example is provided in Figure 2.1.The central issue is to establish a reporting structure that allows the nursery manager to focus on the task.