Starfish Childrens Day Nursery

Starfish is an incredible nursery. It's nurturing and full of fun for my kids. They love going there! Two of my children have attended, both for 3 years, and had a wonderful experience. The staff look after them with such kindness and plan an array of exciting and educational activities for them. The manager is brilliant. She supports her team and knows each child very well. Starfish are well preparing my son for school - he now loves to draw, write, sing the alphabet, and try to read books all by himself. Thank you Starfish.

My son has been at Starfish for over a year now and there have been vast improvements made from the introduction of yoga/cooking to field walks and more structured days. The management team is great and they are so quick to make any changes where necessary.

We are happy parents with (most importantly!) happy children.

I would definitely recommend Starfish to anyone considering it for their child, I'm so glad we chose it!

Having had 3 children go through the nursery, over 9 years, we can see the many changes that have been made. All of our children have been happy here. Our youngest is currently still there and in the last 6 months, the changes have been wonderful to witness. There is more transparency with parents, the rooms and nursery have been revamped, all the staff are friendly and have great relationships with my child. We have always recommended this nursery to people and will continue to do so.

We are so happy here and so is our daughter!

I continue to be a happy parent with happy children.

In February '24, we (and 9 other families) decided to withdraw our children from the nursery. We no longer considered it a safe environment due to unstable management, lack of transparency, and staff turnover. Parents observed inconsistent staff-to-child ratios, including inexperienced university students who weren’t all DBS checked hired as bank staff, without first notifying parents. Hygiene declined, and our kids often came home with soiled pants. Despite promises of improvements, the situation didn’t change in my opinion. After giving notice, they initially agreed to release early years funding to the new setting but later reneged. The funding has since been released after we sought intervention from Early Years Funding. All 10 families have also since been sent emails by them threatening legal action if we post negative reviews, which to me just highlights the transparency issue. In my view, this nursery is unreliable and unstable.

I have considered whether or not to review this nursery for a while, as I do not like to leave negative reviews due to the impact it can have. However, due to the nature of my dealings with this nursery, I feel should say something. Some of the staff at this nursery are very nice, kind and caring. However, there are some that should not be allowed to work with children (my opinion). I will not go into the details of what my child told me but I absolutely do believe them. Months later, my child is still talking about them. A complaint was made to the nursery and Ofsted were involved. I immediately withdrew my child from the nursery. The Ofsted report showed that Starfish were not meeting requirements. I would never send my child somewhere where I do not feel 100% sure they are safe and happy. I do not recommend this place to anyone.

Very friendly nursery with wonderful staff. Varied activities to cater to both fun and development of our children. They have a strong community focus, making the whole experience feel like one big family.

We joined Starfish in January 2023 and my little girl has been very happy there. The staff in her room were very supportive whilst she settled in and she now skips in each morning. Staff turnover is high but that’s a sector issue, not a Starfish issue. There have been lots of improvements recently with clear structure and learning activities and I feel like her development is a priority. Overall, very happy with the kind care and attention and how hard the room team works.

The staff at Starfish are amazing! Kind, personable, committed and my kids love it! We’ve had our children here since 2021 and since then the nursery has grown better and better, not only fantastic staff but fantastic premises, the top garden is my son’s (who is an avid bug hunter) favourite place to be, also where they run an amazing forest school. We have a preschooler here age 3 and baby in the baby room age 1.

Always received great care, and I have found the staff to be so attentive and caring, ensuring they had had access to the right level of support.

My son started at Starfish mainly due to his speech delay, me and my partner thought nursery would help this. He has come on leaps and bounds, all thanks to the amazing staff! He's settled so well and we couldn't be happier with his overall progress. Brilliant nursery, lots of activities, friendly staff and always a warm welcome every morning.

We put our daughter into nursery at a young age due to our work commitments. The guilt we felt was awful, however Starfish Nursery gave us all the reassurance that we needed! The warm welcome we got from the start, to the calm environment of the rooms. We can’t thank them enough for taking such great care of our daughter, it’s the best thing we could ever do. The staff are amazing, they work so hard with the children and teach them to become independent. Our daughter is very happy at Starfish and will recommend this nursery to anyone.

Firstly I'd like to say that the staff that looked after our children were brilliant (at least the ones that were DBS checked), under extremely difficult circumstances as most of them haven't been paid on time or have been told they're not very good. However as it may be obvious from my above statement, management and the owner are particularly nasty people, incapable of managing a nursery and as a result, several families including ours have left and are now in a much better place. Don't just take this review, please do some research, look at its history, Ofsted complaints etc. lots of investigations into the owner and the multiple businesses. None of the children have been given leaving dates so we've all lost our funded hours despite them saying it had been done. I think they need every penny and I'm not surprised with the volume of people leaving, avoid for the safety and well-being of your children. As a side note our children are so much happier, it has made a massive difference.

If I could give it 0 stars I would. We loved Starfish when we started there but under the owner and the new manager this year, it has deteriorated to the point where we have removed our children as I didn't believe they were safe there. Day-to-day room staff were all amazing, but some do not have DBS clearance and that was a huge concern. There was an Ofsted investigation due to inappropriate people working there and the owner shut down the nursery reference and opened under a new business ID within weeks, presumably so it wouldn't show to prospective or existing parents. From family-friendly to a mismanaged business that is detrimental to the families who use it. Avoid at all costs.