I Thought I was Managing a Busy Nursery…

If you'd asked me a few years ago how I was doing as a nursery manager, I'd probably have smiled and said, "Busy."

The truth?

I was exhausted.

Every day felt like I was spinning plates.

All day.

Every day.

Staffing issues. Ratios. Parents. Paperwork. Recruitment. Training. Compliance. Budgets. Covering lunches. Covering sickness. Covering annual leave. Covering... everything.

I was just fighting fires from the minute I arrived, to the minute I left. (Hours later than I should have.)

Like so many nursery managers, I found myself spending more and more time in our baby room, not because I wanted to, but because I had to.

At first, I thought I was just helping the team. But standing in that room day after day, rocking a baby that 'just won't settle' allowed me to witness something I'd somehow stopped seeing.

I watched incredible practitioners working unbelievably hard... yet very little of their day was actually spent being with the babies.

Instead, they were caught in what I can only describe now as a conveyor belt.

Nappy. Bottle. Sleep. Record. Clean. Tidy. Reset. Repeat.

Everything was about completing the next task before the next one arrived. The babies were beautifully cared for.

They were safe.

They were fed.

They were changed.

But somewhere amongst all the routines, we'd lost the space for the moments that really matter.

The eye contact.

The conversations.

The wonder.

The play.

The connection.

And the hardest part? It wasn't anyone's fault. Not my team's. Not even mine. (Which took me a long time to understand!)

This was simply the way we'd all been taught.

I'd worked my way up through early years. Every nursery I'd worked in operated in broadly the same way. We inherited systems from the people before us, who inherited them from the people before them. Without realising it, we kept passing those practices down to the next generation of practitioners.

We weren't doing anything wrong. We were simply repeating what we'd always known.

Once I saw it, though, I couldn't unsee it. I knew something had to change. But I also knew I couldn't fix it alone.

Because this wasn't about tweaking a routine. It wasn't about moving snack time or changing a policy. It felt like we'd have to strip everything back. Our routines. Our environment. Our expectations. Our culture. Our ethos. Our entire way of thinking about what life in the baby room could look like.

And honestly? That felt overwhelming.

As nursery managers, we're expected to have all the answers. But this time... I didn't.

And here's where I'd love to tell you I rolled up my sleeves and fixed it all.

I didn't get to.

Life moved on, the way it does in this sector. I left my setting still carrying the list of things I knew needed to change and hadn't managed to. If I'm honest, that list came with me for a long time.

What I know now, that I didn't know then, is that I wasn't failing. I was standing in the middle of something no manager can see clearly from the inside, let alone fix alone.

Next week I'll tell you what happened when I finally saw baby rooms from the other side, and what the settings that HAVE made the change actually did. Because I've now watched it happen, up close, and it's nothing like the enormous overhaul I was bracing myself for.

For now, if you're the manager standing in the baby room at 5.45pm, rocking the baby that just won't settle, with a cup of coffee going cold somewhere on your desk...

I see you. You're not imagining it. And it isn't your fault.