eyworks at Bright Little Stars
- Small Nursery Group
Since opening the doors of their first nursery in 2013, Bright Little Stars have been supporting the Early Years journeys of little ones consistently for a whole decade. After expanding to a group of 6 settings they decided they needed more from their nursery software and made the jump over to eyworks.
Mandy, Bright Little Stars’ Operations Director talked to us about how eyworks is having an impact on their settings. Previous to Bright Little Stars, Mandy had experience in the Early Years sector, both from working within settings and from her work with OFSTED. Here’s what she has to say about using eyworks at Bright Little Stars.
Who are Bright Little Stars?
Bright Little Stars are a group of 6 nurseries in and around the London area. Each of our nurseries is purpose-built and designed to provide the highest quality childcare.
Our ethos of ‘Truth, Love and Compassion’ shines through in everything that we do. We have a unique learning programme that aims to challenge and motivate young children’s thinking and have a positive impact on every child’s learning.
We offer an inclusive approach, offering all children the same opportunities but valuing and respecting the individual needs of all children and their parents.
“It was very straightforward and user-friendly with plenty of features. It was also evident that development was an ongoing process and that customer feedback regarding changes and implementation of new features would be valued.”
-Mandy, Bright Little Stars
What problems were you facing?
Before eyworks, we used a different Early Years software. The system required a lot of manual inputting and needed to be evolving at a faster rate to meet our requirements. When parents enquired via our website, we would receive an email; the data would then be transferred across, manually, into the nursery software system before the admin would send a response. There was no automation in some processes at the time, it was time to move to a system that catered for more of our needs.
How did eyworks help?
The consensus of our team agreed that eyworks would suit the needs of the business more suitably. It was very straightforward and user-friendly with plenty of features. It was also evident that development was an ongoing process and that customer feedback regarding changes and implementation of new features would be valued.
When they want to register interest in Bright Little Stars, parents can now visit our website and fill out an enquiry form which automatically populates onto eyenquiries.
The fact that eyworks has a large range of reports, including custom reports, enables us to tailor a report to exactly what we need. The system also automatically allocates payments for fees as well as vouchers to each child’s account and works out refunds for holidays or closure periods too.
eyworks facilitates our goal to become paperless as parents can fill out their child’s profile and update this digitally. The child profile also allows attachments to be stored on each child’s virtual file.
Staff no longer use paper forms to record information about nappies, meals and sleep, they can now input these on their tablets and update them as the day goes on. Children’s emergency contacts are accessible via eylog which negates the need for paper contact cards for outings or fire evacuations.
See how we can support your Early Years setting
See how eyworks can help your team work
What is it like now that eyworks is in place?
The parents really like eyparent, they love receiving live updates throughout the day. We use something called ‘nursery cam’ separately and they can log into the CCTV whenever they like. The parents like that with eylog they can also look whenever they like at their child’s learning journey and daily diaries to see what they’ve eaten or been doing that day.
With COVID things obviously really changed and parents got used to doing things online so we had to create our own bespoke home learning and parent libraries on our website. If we’d had eyworks at that point we would have had the parent app to use. It’s definitely so much easier for parents to use, they don’t have to remember the password and log in as it’s all on their phone.
One of our parents had printed the photo book that you can do on eylog. They brought it into the nursery, it looks really really nice. The fact that parents can order a photobook through eylog saves us time as well. When children leave at the end of their time at our nursery, which is more or less 5 years, the parents would ask us for photos and we’d be looking through our libraries trying to get some for them. On the PC it took a lot of time but we don’t have to do that now, they can just make their own photo book out of their child’s learning journey.
eyworks is easy to use and has many of the features we were looking for including some further features which would help us to streamline processes further. Being able to tailor your own reports is great for us because we work slightly differently from some other nurseries. Rather than having to adapt our process to fit a system, we are able to completely customise our reports which I think is a really good feature.
As a company, we find the system is really easy to use and the parents also love it!
“As a company, we find the system is really easy to use and the parents also love it!"
-Mandy, Bright Little Stars
