Busy Bees Nurseries

To fulfil its mission to give every child the best possible start in life, Busy Bees – the largest childcare provider in the UK with more than 350 nurseries and 10,000 employees in the UK and Ireland – knew it needed to attract and retain the best people, and that to do so it would have to deliver the best employee experience in the early years sector.

The backdrop was a challenging one. Early years is a sector in which it is challenging to recruit and retain at the best of times – given the huge responsibility and physically demanding roles for comparatively low pay – but post Brexit, post pandemic and following a period of rapid growth, the recruitment and retention challenge was further exacerbated. With demand also “greater than ever” following the introduction of new government funding for more children, the pressure on Busy Bees to attract and retain people had “never been more apparent” and the organisation knew it had to act. 

The team behind the Busy Bees Employee Experience Strategy analysed employee data and a series of feedback mechanisms, including listening groups and surveys, and established that the following areas needed to be addressed: manager engagement; communication; reward and recognition; and benefits and wellbeing. 

Many nursery managers, known as centre directors (CDs), left within their first year, so the team developed an engaging CD induction, including a ‘knowledge hub’ containing all the resources they may need. They also created a development programme to upskill CDs, which achieved “phenomenal” feedback, and introduced an annual ‘CD Con’, which helps CDs connect and feel inspired. A new engagement survey, ‘Be Heard’, was also launched, with the company donating £1 to Child Bereavement UK for every survey completed. Other actions included the introduction of action plans, one to ones in centres with very low scores to develop solutions at a granular level, and a new benefits and wellbeing platform, including enhanced family leave, birthday holidays and menopause support.

In Busy Bees’s most recent engagement survey, completion increased by 41 per cent between 2022 and 2024, and the relaunch of  the ‘Be Brilliant’ annual awards saw nominations rise from 150 in 2022 to almost 2,000 in 2024. Overall attrition decreased by 20 per cent from January 2023 to January 2025, and CD attrition reduced by 37 per cent over the same period.

The PMAs judges praised Busy Bees’s “truly holistic approach, which encompassed many aspects of the business” and the “great depth to their initiatives”, which built “a consistent sense of culture across all sites”.