Westminster Fee Increases 2024

We will be increasing our fees across all of our schools effective with clause 7.9 of your terms and conditions. You can find the fee increases here, which will take effect from November 1st, to be transacted in October 1st billing, giving you the required four weeks notice on the change. I appreciate that such an announcement is never welcome, but I wanted to use this blog post to help articulate our rationale for the fee increases.

CPI

First, I think it’s important to recognise that our terms stipulate that we will increase fees every September based on two primary factors: CPI and what our peers in the local competitor framework appear to be charging for what we deem to be a comparable service

Without the proposed fee increase, our fee increases would be almost half that of inflation over the post covid period (12%), which is unsustainable in light of cost increases across the schools, including, primarily, our staff wages. We need to apply an increase to bring them closer to the median cost increases over the period.

Competitor Framework

We benchmark our fees against the private sector nurseries in the community that offer comparable models to what we do. This can be sometimes tricky when some of the competition offer term based (38 weeks / year; 6 hours / day) models, so we try to establish what the comparable hourly rate would be if we all operated on the same basis i.e. 10 hours / day; 51 weeks a year.

We’re proud of what we do at the school and in the team that delivers the support, care and education that they provide to you and your children and believe that what we offer is both competitive and unique from much of the mainstream early years provision in the area. Those USPs in language learning, amazing excursions and curricula outputs in cultural capital, arts and STEM are services we feel warrant fees that are commensurate with the investment that we’ve put in and will continue to develop further over the coming year with these fee increases.

What and where those funds will be applied:

Staff Salary Increases

We had a raft of salary increases with the rise in minimum wage pay, which we benchmark above for our staff as a general policy. But we are shifting the composition and make up of the schools as my own role, as Managing Director of the Schools, frees up managerial / school principal appointments for my school managers and their respective room leadership teams across the board. So we will be promoting, training and paying those who deliver the educational model more, which, we feel, is both well deserved and will allow us to continue to invest in their CPD and career progression pathways.

Amazing Excursions:

Over the course of the year, I hope you’ve seen our continued work in leveraging the unique benefits our locations provide us with excursions to some of London’s most exciting educational landmarks for our children. They have included the London Aquarium; Buckingham Palace; the Palace of Westminster; Tate Britain; the Southbank Centre for matinees; Vauxhall Farm and shows. These will continue and become embedded in our weekly activities with the children

Charity Engagement

We will be working with and donating to a registered charity in our community to help those in need. Little Village is our chosen charity partner, which has allowed us to register the schools as Baby Banks to receive your donations in clothes, toys and resources to help new families who might otherwise struggle to establish homes within the community with the funds and resources to do that.

We are also developing an active programme for civic engagement with the children, looking at elderly people suffering from social isolation with the opportunity for school visits with the council, along the lines of the Intergenerational Nursery models that have appeared in recent years. We hope to teach children the importance of giving back, taking responsibility for those less fortunate than us in the community and building a sense of action that can empower them with more, charitable activities in the future, something our recent accreditation with Inclusion UK will drive.

Specialist Teachers and Providers

Personal Social & Emotional Development

We've been trialling Mollie’s Mindfulness and Yoga at our Westminster branch this past term and are now thrilled to announce rolling her programme out across all of our schools in the City of London and Southwark too. Molly, the founder, is a qualified children's Yoga Teacher with an NVQ Level 3 Diploma in Early Years, enhancing her teaching and deepening her understanding of child development. Additionally, Molly holds a Level 6 Diploma in Professional Dance and Musical Theatre, bringing a rich, artistic dimension to her approach. She passionately believes in giving all children a voice for their freedom of expression and personal growth

Science Technology Engineering & Maths

Science and Coding

We're in discussion with Little House of Science to roll out our science and coding clubs at all of our schools to help reinforce that knowledge of and excitement about the physical, natural and material world. We want children to develop a sense of how things work, to ask probing questions about why they work that way (to see how they might work better) and generally enjoy things that go pop bang or whizz! The teachers all have achieved Master or PhD degrees from renowned UK Universities, having studied Zoology, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, Biochemistry and Mathematics, as well Science Communications and have active DBS.

Our Arts Programme

Pottery & Ceramics

As our regional thematic education embeds, we're going to be doing much more to investigate the pottery, clay and ceramics of various cultures and traditions from around the world. Which is why we thought it important the children benefit from a weekly class from the masterful Madeline Hall, an established ceramicist from Pimlico and founder of Clay Club. She'll be attending our schools once a week, each of which now has their own throwing wheel to help the children mould, shape, work and build out their own pots, cups and bowls for parents to use...hopefully done in the styles of the various regions' we're investigating!

Music and Drama 

Music and Drama has been central to our educational ethos here at Hatching Dragons since we started in 2015. With shadow puppetry performances, and our Mandarin Music Stay and Play, we've always believed that music and language go hand in hand. Which is why we're so proud 

Our Sports Programme

We believe that sports are fundamental to our children's development. Not only are they a solid foundation for those gross and fine motor skills we want the children to develop in hand-eye-foot coordination, but they help build some of those values we care about: team work; resilience; a bit of healthy competition (and learning to take losing as a positive lesson for growth); determination and so much more. And we're really proud to announce a new weekly sports programme delivered by a couple of our friends in line with our sports curriculum....

Basketball, Football, Tennis & Athletics

Sporty Minis will provide us and the children with Fine, Gross motor skills development & Athletics throughout termly structured curriculum where children will gain intermediate skills of Basketball, Football, Rugby, Tennis and more to foster both a little competitive edge and hand and eye coordination; strengthening core group muscles.   

Martial Arts

Carlotta Vaccari, the toddlers coach of East London’s Fightzone, will be coming to all of the schools to teach mobility and junior BJJ to the preschool class. These fun, non contact sessions are to help children develop discipline, listening, movement and mat based mobility, strength and balance. Carlotta is also a trained nutritionist, working with professional athletes to both coach them and map their optimal diet for mental and physical health, so we look forward to her working with Param, our chef, to give the children the optimal diet for our activities!

Central Team

We will be building out our central and financial team to respond to parent feedback regarding the clarity and simplicity of communications RE customer service, administration and finance.

Discounts & Subsidies

I would like to remind all parents that we do more than any other provider in the area with access to discounts that can be bundled to maximise savings. You can, for instance, secure 5% referral discounts to recommend the school to friends and / or colleagues in the community, which is uncapped by the number of parents you can refer. You can bundle that with our public sector discounts; or with the Local Authority Early Years Funded Hours; or with the Workplace Nursery scheme or with Tax Free Childcare, or Universal Credit or Student Childcare Grants. We’ve calculated that bundling the Workplace Nursery Scheme and Funded Hours can reduce the cost impact of your fees by over 60% so if you would like to discuss our discounts further - book a call with me to talk through your options here 

Conclusion

We are excited by what we do and what we will continue to do in the coming year. We hope that you can see that our fee changes, in light of inflationary and competitive pressures, are reasonable and will continue to support our school and even allow to evolve further with our teachers,  in the work that they do and curriculum that we deliver. We look forward to continuing our journey with you - striving for the care, education and support you’ve received from us over the years.