Helping provide hourly access to childcare
FCSS is a childcare charity that had a vision to make nursery care much more accessible and affordable for families by disrupting the prevailing term commitment model that so many families find unaffordable. The vision was to give every nursery the ability to offer hour-by-hour, flexible access to high quality childcare - making it possible for parents to return to education, training and employment at all levels. The challenge was to deliver a complete, stand alone or companion nursery management system capable of managing all of the service planning, staffing, booking and payment issues required to maintain compliance with the Care Inspectorate while offering the ability for service providers to deliver hour-by-hour care booking at an exceptional level of operational efficiency.
To meet the challenge of a highly disruptive vision for childcare it was critical for us to take both the users of the system and nursery service providers on a journey of possibility that shocked the conventional wisdom and practice.
Co-design was the key to this process. Working with parents and both public and private nursery service providers we went beyond what the initial resistance to discover transformational opportunities to improve the efficiency of service planning, staffing and delivery management for service providers and streamlined booking, payment and reporting for parents.
The outcome is revolutionary - a fully featured, comprehensive nursery management system that can be used by any service provider as a stand-alone service management and staff rota solution or a companion to existing systems that offers flexible clearing of excess service capacity.
The system includes automated Childcare Inspectorate compliant childcare service creation, publication, staff rota management, booking and payment.
The parent app allows enrolled parents to manage and pay for their bookings using a combination of card and funded hours payment methods.
Now every nursery can offer flexible access, supporting parents rather than burdening them with the cost and rigidity of long term commitments.
