Group CEO Simon Irons introduces a new phase for the Busy Bees global family
Today marks a small but not insignificant step for Busy Bees.
We are launching a new website for our global business, something we’ve never had before. It will give us the opportunity to showcase the incredible work of our teams in centres across the globe and the difference they are making to each and every child we care for.
It’ll also be a new home to tell the 'big picture' story of our business and the work we are doing over and above the day-to-day operation of our centres, and allow us to celebrate major milestones as a business.
When Busy Bees was founded over 40 years ago, we had a simple mission: to give the children in our care the best start in life by providing a safe and caring setting in which they could play, learn and flourish.
The aim was to lay the educational foundations that would set our children up to succeed at school and beyond. It was a vision shared by our three founders, all former teachers who believed passionately in the importance of providing that strong educational foundation and supporting women who didn’t want to compromise on their careers simply because they had become mothers.
The world has changed a lot since then, and our business has grown in line with it.
From one centre in Lichfield, UK, which opened in 1984, we now operate in 10 countries across the world caring for around 100,000 children every day. But we remain focused on that same simple mission of providing the best start in life for every child we care for.
Over the past four decades we’ve honed and refined how we work, learning from every family that puts their trust in us and incorporating the latest educational thinking. We’ve developed a child-centred approach that exceeds statutory requirements and maintains high educational and safeguarding standards, consistently practised in every Busy Bees setting.
After thirty years of caring for children in the UK, back in 2013, we believed we’d developed a successful model that had lots to offer families beyond our borders.
We started to research other markets where the demographics offered the opportunity for us to grow: those in which more mothers were returning to work and a high value was placed on their child’s early educational development in a safe and trustworthy setting.
This process led to our first acquisition of Knowledge Universe, a chain of 60 centres in Singapore and Malaysia, and over the past decade that has been followed by our entry into Canada, Australia, Ireland, Italy, the USA, New Zealand and Vietnam.
This growth programme has only been possible with the support of our long-term investment partner, who believed in our vision of bringing the Busy Bees best start in life to other countries. Their backing has enabled us to grow internationally and also to invest significantly in our existing centres so we can offer the ideal learning environment, and in recruiting, training and retaining the very best people.
Whilst we fully understand that every family’s expectations of childcare are individual, and that each seeks a personalised experience for their child, one of the benefits of our model is that behind that one-to-one experience sits decades of knowledge and expertise, as well as the stability and access to resources that comes with being part of a global network.
A great example of this is our Talent Exchange Programme through which our colleagues visit other Busy Bees centres around the world to see how childcare is delivered in different cultures and geographies, encouraging the sharing of best practices across the group.
This global reach not only offers access to new insights into the best educational approaches around the world, but it has also helped us to be more resilient as a business. The pandemic was a great example of this, where different responses by governments around the world meant we were able to mitigate the impact of closures in some markets as we continued to operate in others.
Our international footprint also gives us a good understanding of different childcare systems and training regimes which we can draw on to be a champion for our sector and contribute to discussions about how best providers and governments can work together.
Sharing the benefits of this experience with our many stakeholders is something we see as our responsibility as a sector leader as we enter an important time for our industry.
Whether it’s HRH the Princess of Wales’ ‘Shaping Us’ campaign, or research to understand the impact of the long-term pandemic on young children, there is unprecedented interest in the early years sector.
And with general elections coming up in some of our key markets this year, and major childcare policy changes in the pipeline, we want to play our part in helping to shape a better future for our industry.
For us, that means being part of a diverse marketplace that offers parents real choice, with the right policies in place to support a sustainable funding model.
We want as many families as possible to have access to good quality childcare that they trust and can rely on, to empower parents to pursue their goals and offer more children around the world the best start in life. And we’re committed to working with other providers, stakeholders and governments across the world towards that goal.