A day care centre looks after children of working parents for most of the day. Here is how to select, train, roster and keep the caregivers who feed, change, teach and watch over them.
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Share your requirementsA day care centre looks after infants, toddlers and often school-age children from morning until parents collect them in the evening, including after school hours and school holidays. The team includes caregivers, helpers and ayahs, a cook, cleaners, a van driver, a nurse or first aider on call and a manager who deals with parents. Children arrive and leave at staggered times, so handover and pick-up safety matter as much as the care in between. Parents expect updates, clean spaces and sound meals. See also HR for education. People work here turns on who is allowed to collect a child, how adults are spread across the day and how the daily routine is passed from one shift to the next.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in day care centres. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Many parents, relatives and drivers arrive at once, and a child can be handed to the wrong person if the rules are not firm.
The morning caregiver knows a child's feed, allergy or mood, and the evening caregiver may not hear it.
School children join the day care for long periods, and numbers rise exactly when staff take leave.
A parent tells one caregiver about a food allergy or medicine, and the message does not reach all.
Caregivers stand and carry children all day, and a slightly better offer elsewhere draws them away.
A new helper is taken on through a relative, and checks on background are light.
Safe sleep, feeding, hygiene and first aid are taught when time allows, which is rarely.
Messages and calls reach whoever has the phone, and replies vary in tone and accuracy.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Employee Administration; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for education, not in general.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a day care centres business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Who may collect, how identity is checked, what happens when someone unlisted arrives and who signs.
Who may collect, how identity is checked, what happens when someone unlisted arrives and who signs. Train staff and keep the rule with the HR documentation.
A short note on each child's feeds, naps, medicine, allergy and mood, filled at every shift change and checked by the lead.
A short note on each child's feeds, naps, medicine, allergy and mood, filled at every shift change and checked by the lead.
A chart showing adult cover at arrival, meals, naps and closing, with named relievers, using the attendance, shift and leave process.
A chart showing adult cover at arrival, meals, naps and closing, with named relievers, using the attendance, shift and leave process.
One visible record that every caregiver reads each morning, with a parent sign-off.
One visible record that every caregiver reads each morning, with a parent sign-off.
Structured interviews, references and a supervised trial, set by the recruitment process.
Structured interviews, references and a supervised trial, set by the recruitment process.
Safe sleep, feeding, hygiene, first aid and behaviour, with refreshers set in the learning and development process.
Safe sleep, feeding, hygiene, first aid and behaviour, with refreshers set in the learning and development process.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Checked and supervised selection of caregivers and helpers.
Cover by hour and a plan for holiday peaks.
Regular training on safe sleep, feeding and first aid.
Written pick-up and handover rules every adult can follow.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in education, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Faculty, administrative and support staff leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it within the academic calendar.
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A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
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Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
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A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Keep a written list of who may collect each child, check identity every time and train staff to refuse politely when unsure. Record every handover.
Use a short written sheet for feeds, naps, medicine, allergies and mood, and a quick spoken handover at the door.
Plan numbers early, line up trained part-time helpers and limit leave in the peak weeks.
Keep one visible record, ask each caregiver to read it every morning and get a parent sign-off when it changes.
Pay on time, offer fair hours and rest, recognise good work and show a path to senior caregiver or room lead.
Name one contact, set a response time and keep a short note of what was said and agreed.
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