Experienced Nursery Manager (part time or full time)

Nursery Manager – Flexible Full-Time or Part-Time

A hands-on leadership role with less paperwork and more time to lead people, quality and service

Little Ducklings Nursery is looking for a highly experienced Nursery Manager and people leader to lead our setting during a period of long-term absence.

Unlike many Nursery Manager positions, this role is not heavily admin or paperwork focused. You will be supported by an experienced Admin Manager, Nursery Director, and established Room Leaders, allowing you to spend your time where your experience has the greatest impact: leading people, being visible in the nursery, maintaining high standards and delivering an excellent service to children and families.

We are particularly interested in someone with many years of people-management experience who knows how to get the best from a team. You will be hands-on, approachable and confident: someone who notices what is happening, addresses issues promptly, coaches people effectively and creates a culture of warmth, accountability and high expectations.

Flexible working

We are open to full-time or part-time working and flexible hours for the right candidate.

For us, finding an exceptional and experienced leader is more important than fitting someone into a rigid working pattern. We are happy to discuss how the role could work around the right person whilst ensuring the nursery has the leadership coverage it needs.

Your main focus

Your role will primarily be to:

• Lead, motivate and develop the team, particularly our Room Leaders and senior practitioners.
• Be highly visible and hands-on across the nursery, ensuring standards are consistently maintained.
• Monitor the quality of teaching, care, safeguarding and service delivery and intervene constructively where improvement is needed.
• Set clear expectations and hold people accountable whilst maintaining a positive, supportive culture.
• Coach, supervise and develop the leadership team, strengthening their confidence and capability.
• Ensure the nursery consistently meets EYFS, Ofsted, safeguarding, health & safety and statutory requirements.
• Maintain a safe, smooth and well-organised nursery, including effective staffing, deployment and ratios.
• Build excellent relationships with parents and provide outstanding customer service, responding to concerns with warmth, professionalism and good judgement.
• Lead purposeful staff meetings, training and development to continuously improve practice.
• Work closely with the Nursery Director on nursery performance, quality, occupancy and continuous improvement.

This is probably the right role for you if…

You have substantial experience managing people, ideally gained over many years in nursery or early years leadership.

You are a natural people manager who is comfortable having difficult conversations when necessary, but who also knows how to motivate, coach, recognise and bring out the best in people.

You enjoy being on the floor, observing practice, talking to staff and parents and solving problems rather than spending most of your working week behind a desk completing paperwork.

You are commercially aware and understand that an excellent nursery needs to combine outstanding care and education with excellent customer service, strong occupancy and efficient operations.

You are also:

• Warm, confident and an excellent communicator.
• Calm and decisive when dealing with challenges.
• Highly knowledgeable about the EYFS, safeguarding and Ofsted expectations.
• Able to recognise excellent practice — and equally able to identify when standards are slipping and take action.
• Experienced in performance management, supervision and developing leaders.
• Passionate about creating an excellent experience for children, parents and staff.
• Qualified to a full and relevant Level 3 in Early Years or above. Level 5+, Montessori or Forest School experience would be an advantage.

Less administration. More leadership.

We want to be particularly clear about what makes this opportunity different.

We already have strong administrative and back-office support. The Nursery Manager will, of course, retain appropriate management oversight and statutory accountability, but we do not want a highly experienced manager spending unnecessary hours completing routine administration that can be handled elsewhere.

We want you with the team — observing, coaching…