It has taken me a long time to write this review as I am still getting over how shocking the whole experience was. I have had two previous childminders who were both amazing and when I found Amanda I thought she would be the third.

Amanda looked after my children from September to December and I can honestly say choosing her was the worst mistake I made. Initially she seemed like a lovely lady who was prepared to work with me to offer the best childcare for my needs. Unfortunately this wasn't the case. Before I decided to use her I had discussed with her that I was looking at a 30 hours funded place for my youngest who would be three in October and after some thought she agreed to do so. She also recommended I set up tax free childcare allowance which we were also entitled to so we did.

My first issue occured in the first week my children were in her care as my nearly three year old regressed in his toilet training and had some accidents. I expected this might happen being a new environment but as she has a lot of expensive items in her house it is really not set up for children to have accidents. She wanted me to put him back into nappies but as he had been out of them for four weeks I didn't agree. He soon got past the accidents when he started feeling more comfortable but her approach was quite unsupportive.

I also had the issue that my oldest son (4) wasn't settling very well and in all honestly his behaviour was not good as he was struggling with both starting school and starting with a new childminder. Amanda didn't seem to understand that these changes in his world was causing the behaviours and kept talking to me about him having anger issues. I personally would expect a childminder to have much more awareness of how children can struggle at times of change.

Then came the issue of claiming tax free childcare. She hadn't set herself up on it as we had agreed so we couldn't claim for the first month. I then spent the first month reminding her to do it and being told she hadn't had time on many occasions. She did have a lot going on in her personal life but we didn't want to lose another month of tax free childcare. Of course as the month got close to the end she then tried to do it but as it takes about 3 weeks this was another month we lost. This was a loss of £400 to us and I can honestly say that we didn't really even get an apology for this as she stated we knew she had a lot going on. We clearly understood that she was having some personal issues but believe that should not result in us losing £400.

The final issue that told me that she wasn't the right person for us and our childcare needs was that she then decided she didn't want to register so that we could claim 30 free hours of childcare as she didn't want HMRC looking through her accounts. Obviously she had promised us this before we settled our children but she didn't see this as important and expected us to suck up the cost of her changing her mind. We had many discussions about this as we felt this was hugely unprofessional but she still refused. At this point we decided to move our children as we needed the 30 free hours to ensure that working was feasible.

A few more concerns I had included behaviour of her daughter (22 years old) while we were discussing the whole shambles. She came out of the house shouting at me about it which made me worry about what my children were seeing in the house. Also Amanda doesn't really seem to understand how to work the payments out and accused me of letting her get it wrong. She had decided I needed to pay her for a week's holiday even though this was not worked out in the original payments.

In the 3 months my youngest child was there they did not go on any day trips (except for local playgroups or parks) and I hardly know what he did do as there was never anything written. When I asked I did get some information by WhatsApp but that was not regular.

Amanda didn't even want to make the last day a pleasant goodbye and instead spent her time refusing to give us receipts for the payments we had made. Even though we are perfectly entitled to them she thought we were trying to do something dodgy?? That was very sad for the children as they wanted to say goodbye to her and I felt they should.

Overall a disappointing experience and not recommended by us.

• Overall
• Setting
• Food
• Communication