About Us

Affordable hourly childcare where every child is respected, encouraged to be curious and given opportunities to thrive

Where We Came From

Little Pearls Nursery was previously known as Horizon Childcare; a children's nursery registered with Ofsted since March 2016. The nursery was originally created to help domiciliary care staff, at a large local company, find affordable childcare in Exeter. Since opening to the wider public in 2017, the popularity of the nursery increased rapidly and the nursery expanded in size in August 2019 to meet the growing demand for high-quality, hourly childcare. In 2023, the nursery was very much established in its own right and separated from the care company to be its own independent business under the name of Little Pearls Nursery Limited.

We continue to learn, grow and develop as a business. We feed off the views of children, parents and other professionals we work with to keep improving all the time.

What Does Our Nursery Look Like?

Our nursery has a homely atmosphere and a personal ethos; we take up to 55 children a day split across 3 rooms. The intimacy of the setting allows families to settle in quickly. Throughout the day we follow a detailed routine suited to each age range to provide a wealth of exciting, educational activities to facilitate children’s learning through play.

We are fortunate to have two large outside spaces for the children to use in all weather. Our gardens offer a range of equipment including a playhouse, mud kitchen, sand area and dinosaur world.

Parents have the choice of bringing a packed lunch for their children or ordering hot meals with a pudding for lunch. Snacks and breakfast is included.

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Safeguarding

Safeguarding is of the utmost importance at Little Pearls. Our team have been through an extensive recruitment process and have enhanced DBS checks. Each member of staff has also completed safeguarding training and receives regular training and supervision meetings to check ongoing suitability for their role. Our nursery building and resources are risk assessed and all visitors are accompanied at all times. No mobile phones are allowed to be used around the children and we work closely with other agencies to safeguard the children in our care.

Early Years Foundation Stage for Learning and Development

We follow the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum within the nursery, which guides our professional practice. Using this as a starting block we have developed our own personal curriculum, centring around meaningful experiences, natural resources and a personal approach to support each child in their learning. We endeavour to plan exciting activities filled with awe and wonder for the children, whilst taking into account their age range and ability. We continually observe and play with the children and track their development. Our Famly software also makes it quick and simple to provide regular updates and pictures from nursery to get families involved.

We ask for parents to keep us updated with each child's interests at home, current places they've visited and special people in each child's life. All of this can be used at our nursery to follow your child's interests and get them excited about learning. We can also offer advice and support for parents about how to educate your child at home, top tips and resources to borrow. We will regularly feedback with you about your child's progress through informal discussions, sharing observations, assessments (such as the 2 year old progress check) and parent evenings. At Horizon Childcare all education is play-based to ignite a love for learning.

If we have any concerns about a child’s natural progression of development we work with families (and other professionals if needed) to make a plan of action to help every child to succeed.

Regular Communication

Once your child has started nursery with us we will strive to keep you up-to-date with their progress using: informal chats on drop off and collection; observations and assessments; parent evenings and daily updates through our online system, Famly. Through Famly, you have the most recent care information about your child as well as daily updates on their activities, regular progress reviews and easy communication with the team at your fingertips.

We also send out a monthly newsletter to keep you up-to-date with the nursery as a whole and send out a survey every six months so we can get your views on how we are doing. We invite any parents or professionals we work with to give us feedback in order to continually improve the service we provide.

Transition to School

We offer hourly childcare bookings, meaning that families only pay for what they need. Bookings of between 7 and 11 hours can be booked between the hours of 7am – 6pm. We can offer both term-time and all-year-round bookings, as well as ad-hoc bookings if you need extra days of childcare. We also offer 50% holiday discount for days you don't need when booked in advance, with no limit on holiday bookings. We also offer a full-time discount for bookings of 10 or 11 hours across 5 days each week.

Fees & Help With Finances

We are largely more affordable than many of our competitors and we cater for children in receipt of government funding.

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