Childcare at the click of a mouse
Finding the right childcare at the right price is the bane of many parents’ lives. It’s not just when the children are little, but all the way through as the focus shifts from nurseries to holiday childcare and babysitting.
In the past, it has been a question of contacting the local authority for details of childcare services, word of mouth or doing your own research locally. In the internet age, though, more and more online services are developing which make things much quicker and easier. Chief among these is www.findababysitter.com [FAB], which not only provides details of babysitters in your area, but also every conceivable type of childcare, from out of hours care, nannies, childminders and nurseries to au pairs.
The site was set up as a community site of childcarers and parents in 2006 by Tom Harrow and Vanessa Cook, both of whom were new parents. Vanessa had earlier launched an offline nanny service catering to exclusive clients who needed highly qualified, bilingual childcare and saw the need for a service everyone could use. For the first two years, the service was free to allow it to build up a momentum and a good user base largely through word of mouth, but last year it relaunched as a paid for service with much more comprehensive cover of the whole of the UK, even rural areas and remote outposts. While more childcare options emerge on a search of urban areas due to population density, a search in a rural part of Essex, for instance, elicits a number of different possibilities. The site has also received significant funding from an angel investor to work on additional features and on expansion into Europe.
Charges
The site does not charge childcare providers to post profiles or search local jobs, but it does charge parents, although they can try FAB and post a trial job for free. Prices are at a competitively low rate. For just £6.95, for instance, parents have basic access and can post a job offer and contact carers. Charges are based on how much time you need access to the site. For example, it costs £75 for a full year’s subscription, but you may only need access to childcarers for 30 days which costs £15 or 60 days, which would cost just £25.
You can check out childcare possibilities in your area for free – many childcarers who post on the site have years of experience working in nurseries or as registered childminders. You can search by various options, such as babysitters, nannies or childminders and by proximity to your home. The site also works with small childcare agencies to help them find candidates for their clients.
Each childcare provider provides details about themselves, including information such as how many years’ experience they have and whether they have had a CRB check. FAB do manually check all new childcare profiles and jobs posted by parents before they go online to make sure there is nothing untoward in what is said, but they strongly advise parents to check all references. They provide online advice on how to do this and the kind of questions to ask at an interview. They also post advice about what the normal salaries of childcare workers should be and the duties which parents can expect to be performed.
In addition, they can respond to individual requests for help and advice from parents. If parents report a bad experience with a childminder, the site can take action to investigate them and, if necessary, remove them.
There are more than 15,000 parents and 25,000 childcarers currently registered on the site and, according to FAB’s marketing director Ben Ferrier, the numbers have been growing “at an accelerated rate of around 3,000 per month since the start of the year”. Ben has only recently started working at FAB and part of his role is to build relationships with other like-minded organisations and build community resources, such as testimonials and other ways to ensure parents are more confident about the services they use.
He will also be involved in the European expansion. The site already provides a free service in France, which has been active for around a year, and is looking to relaunch this when it has built up enough of a database. Other European countries, such as Spain,are also in its sights.
More information for parents is available here.
More information for parents is available here.
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