Best park?

[Beauchamp1]

any thoughts?

[Digbina]

Hi Beauchamp

I was just about to post a reply (had to finish watching Bake Off first) and now I see you've deleted your post asking for feedback on the Villa. Funnily enough, I was about to preface my reply by saying that the staff at the Villa do monitor this forum and have been known to make threats about 'legal implications' to the admin to get uncomplimentary posts removed. It happened to me. However, people posting factual information about their experiences or actual events should not worry that this is unlawful.

That said, since you asked about the pick ups and drop offs, I wanted to share my story with you. My son no longer attends the Villa, and this is why:

My son was there until last year. I took him out for various reasons but the main one was that after he was able to get out of the main building (the door lock was broken and had been for some time) I no longer felt that he was safe there. He'd made his way from the garden, through the cloakroom, through another two rooms and had opened the front door when in an amazing stroke of luck, my nanny found him just as she was arriving to pick him up. When she took him back to the garden, the staff had no idea he'd been gone or for how long. His keyworker then tried to blame him for "not telling them where he was". He was 3.5 at the time.

We weren't contacted by the management and they didn't report themselves to Ofsted (in fact, we didn't hear from the Villa management until a couple of days later - coincidentally, the afternoon of the morning after I reported them to Ofsted). We weren't happy with the Villa's response so I took things up with the council who said that they saw it as a breach of the EYFS welfare standards (children to be within sight and/or hearing at all times) and conducted a non-routine safeguarding audit. To my knowledge, they never informed the other parents, which I am pretty sure they are supposed to do.

I had other concerns about pick-ups eg when in Caterpillars my son would come to me with a dirty nappy or sopping wet sleeves which indicated that they were not paying as much attention as they could have. I did speak to management about that and matters improved.