Nursery Chains: League tables - All in order

The positions of the largest nursery groups in our annual table of the biggest chains in the UK reflect the trend in recent years of the corporatisation of the early years sector - the continuing rise of the big chains.

The ten biggest players still dominate the top half of the table, their positions largely unchanged from last year. During the past 12 months many of them have opened new settings or increased the number of places they offer at their existing ones.

These findings mirror those of Laing & Buisson's Children's Nurseries UK Market Report 2014, published last week, which highlights the first significant rise in the number of nurseries since the mid-2000s.

Collectively, the top 25 groups provide a total of 81,136 registered childcare places and own or manage 1,083 early years settings.

This is an increase of 3,817 places - up from 77,319 on 2013's figures - and 53 more nurseries.

Busy Bees has consolidated its position as by far the largest group in the country, with the buyout this year of Kinder Nurseries and Caring Daycare, two sizeable nursery groups, which were respectively the 15th and 19th largest chains in our 2013 table.

It has also been a good year for Derby-based Treetops Nurseries, which acquired the 15-strong Happy Child group of nurseries to extend its presence in London and Cheltenham.

There has been more movement in the bottom half of the table, with All About Children moving up eight places from 20th to 12th position. This chain was set up just four years ago by Russell Ford, the former chief executive of Asquith Nurseries, who has grown the group steadily so that it now owns 13 settings and employs more than 300 people.

Kids Planet, based in Cheshire, has moved up from 25th to 15th place, after buying two Jeffrey's Corner nurseries. The group has plans to continue to acquire nurseries in Greater Manchester and Cheshire next year.

The highest first-time entry to the table is Magic Nurseries, which has grown through its acquisition this year of the Laurels Group of Nurseries, based in Leicestershire. It has doubled in size from eight nurseries to 17 and now offers close to 1,100 places.

It has ambitious plans to continue rapid expansion by acquiring high-quality stand-alone nurseries and small groups.

Childcare East Midlands is the second highest new entry with 11 nurseries. The group, which also runs out-of-school playschemes, says it is currently in negotiations to buy other nurseries in the Nottingham and Mansfield areas.

Nursery Chains' 2014 directory includes details of 176 nursery groups, including ten new chains.

Names to watch include the YMCA Fairthorne Group, which is based in Southampton and owns nine nurseries and two pre-schools. The group has opened two new settings this year and is adding a 75-place nursery in Winchester to open in January 2015.

In an interview with Nursery World in September, the group's director Sally Arscott said that growth had been driven by demand, particularly by the need for more places for funded two-year-olds.

At the end of last year, the group expanded the Fairthorne Manor setting at a cost of £170,000 to increase the number of places from 89 to 128.

The Big Life Group and Happy Kids Childcare, both featured on page 12, are newcomers to the directory. Big Life owns and manages nine nurseries and children's centres in deprived areas in Manchester and Stockton-on-Tees. It also runs a free school and has plans for a second primary free school to open next year.

Happy Kids Childcare, operating in Yorkshire and Manchester, was set up just two years ago primarily to offer funded places for twos and provision for low-income families.

Ofsted reports

For the fourth consecutive year, we have also compared the Ofsted grades given to the nurseries of the largest chains in England.

In our 2014 Ofsted reports table, Kids 1st, which this year opened its tenth setting, retains the number one spot for the fourth consecutive year. The group has the highest proportion of outstanding nurseries, with two-thirds of its nurseries receiving the top grade, and one-third of its settings graded as good.

Kids Allowed and Kids Planet are in joint second place. Both groups have the same proportion of outstanding and good settings, with 60 per cent of their nurseries graded outstanding and 40 per cent of them graded good.

Childbase has slipped from second to fourth place this year, although more than half of its 47 nurseries are graded outstanding.

Happy Days is in fifth place with 40 per cent of its nurseries graded outstanding and 60 per cent good.

We lay claim to being unique in compiling this data, which is gathered by analysing all the Ofsted reports of the 20 largest groups - no mean feat!

Our points-based rating system allows us to determine a top-20 table for quality.

The results are always interesting.

Although comparing Ofsted reports will never show the whole story, they remain the best way we have of finding out how the big chains measure up in terms of the quality of their provision.

It is heartening to see that quality has improved across the board this year, with an improvement in the average score among these groups.

This year nursery groups in the top 20 biggest groups have an average score of 3.21, up from 3.06 in 2013, signifying an upward rise in their grades.

This looks even more significant if we look back to 2011, when we first devised the scoring system and the average score was 2.93.

Good news for the early years sector then, as we look forward to 2015.

MAKING THE GRADE: HOW DO THE CHAINS MEASURE UP?

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NOTES ON TABLE

• Compiled from the latest published Ofsted reports.
• The percentages given are based on the number of published Ofsted reports available for each group.
• For the purposes of our survey, in order to compare like with like, we have only included nurseries registered and inspected by Ofsted and excluded nurseries in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland, which fall under different inspection regimes.
• Where Ofsted reports are unavailable, for example if settings are new registrations, we have discounted these.
• As inspections are carried out on average every three years, some of the latest inspection reports are more recent than others. This means that we have also included inspections carried out under the previous Ofsted inspection regime when nurseries were awarded separate grades for education and care. Where nurseries have been inspected for care and education 0.5 has been allocated for each grade.

Table rankings
We allocated points to each setting on the basis of their Ofsted report. For each group, the total number of points was then divided by the number of reports to give a final score.
Red figures in brackets show
last year’s scores.
Outstanding: 5 points
Good: 3 points
Satisfactory/ Requires Improvement: 1 point
Inadequate: 2 points

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