Become a childminder early educator
If you’re passionate about helping children develop and thrive with your own childminding business, we’re here to support you. With high-quality training, one-to-one business mentoring and a large community of like-minded professionals, we can help you launch your new career.
Start your own childcare business
If you share our passion for helping children reach their full potential, working as a childminder early educator could be a career for you.
Childminders are highly skilled professionals who provide care and learning for other people’s children in their own homes. They also play a vital role in delivering early years education to help improve the outcomes of the children they work with.
It’s an extremely rewarding career and is within your reach.
As well as equipping you with the skills and knowledge you need to become an outstanding childminder, our high-quality training programmes can also help you establish and maintain a sustainable and profitable childcare business.
Our unique approach will empower you to create your own business providing quality home-based childcare and early education. We focus on providing all the fundamentals you need to succeed, including marketing, compliance, business administration and finance.
At the end of our programme, you’ll be a registered childminder with the skills and experience you need to provide high quality childcare services to your community and make a positive impact on the lives of local children.
To get started, book onto our free live webinar to find out more about starting and registering your new business. Click on the link below to secure your space.
Why become a childminder?
There are many reasons to become a childminder early educator, including:
Make a living while making a difference
You can earn a living while helping children grow, develop and thrive. With average salaries ranging between £25,000–£35,000 per year, it’s an extremely rewarding career.
The freedom of running your own business
Get a career with freedom and flexibility, with complete step-by-step support and training to set up your childcare business in 2-3 months and ongoing mentoring to help it grow.
A career you can run from the comfort of home
You can shape your business from home and turn it into a safe, nurturing and enriching environment where children can learn and develop essential skills to set them up for life.
Why @Home Childcare?
We’re an award-winning Ofsted Childminder Agency.
We provide fully-funded step-by-step support and training to help you become a registered childminder early educator and set up your new childcare business in 2-3 months. We can also help you to raise your profile and find parents looking for childcare in your area.
And you’ll continue to receive ongoing support and training as a member of our professional childminder community.
We offer different start-up services to match the preferred level of support you need to set up and run your own home-based childcare business. Our Full Support Services also include ongoing business and marketing support to help lighten the load of running your own business.
Our Funded Support Services
Depending on which level of support you choose, our funded start-up service includes some or all of the following:
- Initial home visit to check your home and provide advice
- Step-by-Step business planning
- Funded pre-registration training - a comprehensive course delivered as blended training
- Paediatric First Aid Training
- Online Food Safety Training
- A toolkit with essential policies/procedures, consent forms, contracts etc
- Telephone & email support with the registration process
- Profile webpage to help you find parents interested in childcare
- Free advertising to help fill your childcare vacancies
- Registration inspection (a 3-4 hour home visit)
- Public liability insurance
Just in case you’ve got these FAQs in mind…..
As long as you commit to registering within 2 - 3 months of commencing the start-up process with us, we will fund the biggest cost of setting your business which is the start-up training. We also provide further benefits such as free marketing, Food Safety training and even free insurance.
However, we are careful about who we fund. We are interested in people who would like a 'helping hand' with setting up and running their business; so they know they would benefit from all our full support package that it has to offer. We ask for a £99 contribution towards the funding for full support start-up.
We also have a standard package which is designed for people who only wish to access our core service, without additional business support. This costs between £225 - £325, depending on whether you need first aid and food safety training or not.
You pay us for the full support service through a small hourly flat rate which we recommend you include in the fee you charge to parents. Our fee always remains as a flat rate, not based on your total earnings.
For the standard service, the monthly membership fee is £35, plus a very small nominal fee per child, per month, which you charge to parents as pence in your hourly rate.
Once registered, you will benefit from our full support service which includes a personal mentor to provide guidance and support, regular training, continuous marketing of your business, annual inspections, legislation updates, continuous regulation, plus loads more!
It’s simple! We want to empower more people to set up early education businesses in their own homes. As a community interest company, we have a social mission to remove the barriers that prevent suitable, capable people from registering as childminder educators. That’s why we fund so much of your start-up to help you launch your business and reach parents looking for childcare.
It is essentially a business-to-business service as we give you continuous business and specialist early years support, training and regulation, in exchange for you providing childcare to parents. Our quality improvement support, which forms our core service to educators, enables you to provide a Good, and in some cases, Outstanding childcare service.
Business planning is vital if you are going to set up a successful business! We want you empower you to have a profitable, sustainable business providing quality care and early education. The business planning process we guide you through is, in fact the coursework needed for the funded training. The coursework is a mixture of written tasks and professional discussions. This helps to keep it manageable for you.
However, be warned, it is not all plain sailing! We take our support and regulatory role very seriously, so we are only interested in people who are 100% committed to setting up a childcare business and understand the importance of thorough business planning. It is absolutely essential that you complete your business plan coursework, we will not register you without it. Therefore, please be prepared for the importance we place on the coursework.
The intensive support we provide is intended to help you with the end to end process of getting your business off the ground, including marketing your childcare and handling parents’ enquiries.
Once registered, you continue to benefit from our expert support, thus ensuring running a childminder business is more manageable for you.
Our educators come from a range of different backgrounds and careers such as: teaching assistants, social work, nursing, retail, HR, nursery professionals, elderly care, as well as parents and grandparents.
The ideal person is someone who:
- Loves being with children; you get a buzz helping them learn and develop
- Happy to provide care in your own home, and can create a nurturing, safe place for children to thrive
- Would love to do something for yourself; you like the idea of having a childcare business at home, but would rather have the full support of an expert company, who are only a telephone call away, and can provide everything-under-one-roof service to help you grow and develop
- Specifically likes the idea of having a company who provides extensive start-up and on-going business support to help you set up and run a sustainable business
- Understand early years is the most important stage in a child’s life where high quality childcare can enrich children lives and have a positive impact that lasts a lifetime
- Understand good levels of English and Maths are essential for delivering the early years curriculum and running a business
Absolutely, we are simply here to act as your ‘back-office’ support with helping to find parents to use your service, enrolling parents, fee collection, dealing with parents who do not pay, administering early education funding and lots more. You remain in charge of your business including parents/children you wish to work with, your opening hours, the structure of your day, the kind of activities you offer etc. We encourage you to brand your business by giving it a name so that it reflects your personal values and ethos.
As an Ofsted community, we also have a duty to provide support and regulation to enable you to provide the best possible service you can. That’s why we give you a personal mentor and provide on-going training and annual inspections. It’s a no-brainer in several ways as you obtain expert guidance and training to build a thriving childcare business, whilst being a member of a professional community who are always here for you.
Childminding can be a lucrative career if it is set up and implemented as a professional business. Your earnings can be anything from £25k – £35k/£40k, depending on your location, your occupancy of children and range of childcare services you provide. We help you to find parents looking for childcare by providing marketing assistance, enabling you to have good numbers of children on roll. We take care of your balance sheet by making sure parents continually pay your fees.
Have a question for us?
If you have a question about anything, big or small, no matter what it is, we’d love to hear from you! Just press the button below, fill out the form and a member of our team will get back to you as soon as we can.
