Waiting Lists

[sharonash]

Hi

 

I manage a day nursery and am finding it a real struggle in sorting out a workable way of operating a waiting list

Our parents seem to change their sessions so much and when we get calls saying do you have any spaces I cant say yes or no its a bit embarrassing!

 

can anyone help/advise me how you do yours or share blank format with me.

 

thanks

[HappyMaz]

What sort of day nursery are you in, and what does your owner think of this problem? What does your admissions policy say? I can't really help because we only have 24 families and are registered for 24 children and consider ourselves busy if we have 18 children each day!

 

It must be tricky maintaining the balance between being able to offer flexibility for children to increase their sessions, new children joining etc.

 

I seem to remember at my children's nursery (sessional pre-school) that you had to 'put your child's name down' for extra sessions for the following term once the current term's places had been allocated. Then the owner could work out how many new children she could take in at once, and offer places at the end of term for the next term according to who was next on the list. There was absolutely no flexibility - always run to capacity so that once you had committed to taking a set number of sessions, you couldn't increase at all.

 

No doubt someone very wise here will pop along later with a tried and tested formula - sorry I'm not much help.

 

Maz

[Beau]

Hi,

 

I'm like Maz in that we are never full on any day so waiting lists are a bit of a joke. Our waiting lists consist of children who are not quite old enough to start and we are all waiting to pounce on them the moment they come of age! If you are in the fortunate position of being full, then I guess you need to be slightly tougher on the parents who have children in terms of insisting they give you notice of changes with a monetary penalty if they don't actually take up a place they have committed to.