<P>The National Day Nurseries Association will stop delivering daycare following the sale of its Grantham regional centre to a Nottinghamshire-based nursery chain and its decision to put its four other centres on the market. </P>
The National Day Nurseries Association will stop delivering daycare following the sale of its Grantham regional centre to a Nottinghamshire-based nursery chain and its decision to put its four other centres on the market.
Children First @Breedon House, of Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, has bought the 112-place nursery in Lincolnshire. It will soon provide daycare for Swingbridge Children's Centre.
NDNA Regional Centres Ltd, a subsidiary company, has put the four other NDNA centres in Birmingham, Halton, Hounslow and Hartlepool on the market.
The centres, which are all neighbourhood nurseries, opened in 2004, and cost on average 1.5m each to build. They were financed by 1.5m of capital funding from the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative, and other sources including the Big Lottery Fund, the London Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund (Nursery World, 9 December 2004).
NDNA chief executive Purnima Tanuku acknowledged that the centres had been difficult to manage because they were scattered geographically.
She said the decision to sell them was a strategic move by the organisation to focus its activities on campaigning on behalf of daycare providers and putting much of its energy into developing the workforce through the National Early Years Enterprise Centre being built in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
Margaret Mason, who owns Children First, is a founder member of the NDNA and a former trustee and national chair. She was also an instigator of the NDNA Quality Counts accreditation. Speaking to Nursery World after signing the Grantham contract, she said, 'It is a challenge. We want to show that our sector is capable of working with the community.'
She said that hard work was needed to develop a good rapport between the local community and the nursery, which was heavily criticised by Ofsted in 2005.
'One of the big difficulties in managing anything is about ownership and consistency of approach, team building and leadership, and I suspect it has been difficult to do these things from afar. All the nursery staff that are here and want to stay will be retained. We have got some changeover of staff who are concerned about their future; that is inevitable in this situation.'
Ms Mason said NDNA was best suited to concentrating on its core business of representing the interests of the daycare sector. 'I don't think necessarily that childcare is part of that. It proved a step too far.'
Ms Tanuku said that 'some of the centres had done better than others' and that the NDNA was concerned to ensure they remained 'community assets'. She was confident this would be the case, given Ms Mason's close links with the NDNA.
Ms Tanuku said, 'Our members are at the heart of everything we do and we have invested a great deal in enhancing and developing our membership services.' She said regional development managers would stay in post, member services would expand and the association would soon launch in Scotland.
She added, 'We would like to thank our dedicated colleagues in the nurseries at all five centres for all their hard work. Our priority now is to ensure that the sale of the remaining centres has the best outcome for the staff, children and parents who use them.'
Children First @Breedon House, of Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, has bought the 112-place nursery in Lincolnshire. It will soon provide daycare for Swingbridge Children's Centre.
NDNA Regional Centres Ltd, a subsidiary company, has put the four other NDNA centres in Birmingham, Halton, Hounslow and Hartlepool on the market.
The centres, which are all neighbourhood nurseries, opened in 2004, and cost on average 1.5m each to build. They were financed by 1.5m of capital funding from the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative, and other sources including the Big Lottery Fund, the London Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund (Nursery World, 9 December 2004).
NDNA chief executive Purnima Tanuku acknowledged that the centres had been difficult to manage because they were scattered geographically.
She said the decision to sell them was a strategic move by the organisation to focus its activities on campaigning on behalf of daycare providers and putting much of its energy into developing the workforce through the National Early Years Enterprise Centre being built in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
Margaret Mason, who owns Children First, is a founder member of the NDNA and a former trustee and national chair. She was also an instigator of the NDNA Quality Counts accreditation. Speaking to Nursery World after signing the Grantham contract, she said, 'It is a challenge. We want to show that our sector is capable of working with the community.'
She said that hard work was needed to develop a good rapport between the local community and the nursery, which was heavily criticised by Ofsted in 2005.
'One of the big difficulties in managing anything is about ownership and consistency of approach, team building and leadership, and I suspect it has been difficult to do these things from afar. All the nursery staff that are here and want to stay will be retained. We have got some changeover of staff who are concerned about their future; that is inevitable in this situation.'
Ms Mason said NDNA was best suited to concentrating on its core business of representing the interests of the daycare sector. 'I don't think necessarily that childcare is part of that. It proved a step too far.'
Ms Tanuku said that 'some of the centres had done better than others' and that the NDNA was concerned to ensure they remained 'community assets'. She was confident this would be the case, given Ms Mason's close links with the NDNA.
Ms Tanuku said, 'Our members are at the heart of everything we do and we have invested a great deal in enhancing and developing our membership services.' She said regional development managers would stay in post, member services would expand and the association would soon launch in Scotland.
She added, 'We would like to thank our dedicated colleagues in the nurseries at all five centres for all their hard work. Our priority now is to ensure that the sale of the remaining centres has the best outcome for the staff, children and parents who use them.'