Our 3yo boy has been with Theresa for 4 full days a week for 3 months. We were looking forward to have him in a "home from home" settlement after a busy nursery and Theresa seemed to fit the bill. She does offer great activities like weekly visits to local toddler groups and the softplay and during half term she took the kids to a fire station - all very positive. 

Unfortunately, the term time childcare turned out to be rather dull for our boy, who loves to read books and needs a lot of running around. At drop off and pick up, we could always see that the TV was on and from an episode where our boy and her had a face off over lunch we can tell that the TV seems to be on at lunch time at least occasionally, too. Not once have we picked up our son and seen Theresa in the same room as the kids interacting with them. We were used to rich and colourful artwork, but now it was rare - mainly consisting of stickers on paper or a single colour crayons. Don't get me wrong: We don't expect every childminder to be the crafty or reading type, we just couldn't quite see where the emphasis was with her childcare.. It probably didn't help that the other two kids in her care are much younger than our son, so guess they would have very different needs.

Theresa has done this job for many years and while we understand that certain routines work for her, this seems to have led to a "My way or the highway" approach where we didn't feel like our boy's development or our wishes as parents where taken seriously or relevant. We don't think that Theresa tried to understand what motivates our son or how we communicate with him - so this resulted in the line of communication both between Theresa and our son and us breaking up very early. 

The main issue that made us change our mind though was that our boy seemed to change. When picked up at nursery he would be bubbly about all the books he's read, songs he'd danced too etc - but  all we got out of him in the evening when we asked about the day was  "I had fun at Theresa's house" - which didn't sound very convincing when he was crying every morning that he didn't want to go back - or "I must listen to Theresa" - which we found a bit odd. 

There was a lot of negative communication about the "things I would expect a 3 year old to do himself" - like getting a tissue and wiping your nose, dress on your own etc - but not much positive points. Initially we had mentioned how we want our child to be able to be a child as long as possible, still we felt that there were tests set out where he was expected to fail, without a plan in place on how to develop those skills that she was so determined to see. We didn't get much feedback beyond "we've been to the toddler group today" and didn't see any pictures of activities after the first 3 weeks. 

Our boy turned 3 around Christmas and Theresa had agreed on offering the 30 funded hours. We had checked our eligibility and she handed the necessary paperwork to us. When we handed in our notice just after Christmas (as we didn't want to ruin the festivities), Theresa suddenly decided to not offer the 30 funded hours anymore this term with reasons that the council explained to us as not valid. The council offered to mediate, but this was declined. We are talking 150 funded hours, for a young family this is a lot of money! 

After an episode where Theresa wasn't at her house for pick up with no warning, not picking up her phone and no apology after (she had run late on an errand, but didn't think it necessary to send us a text so we wouldn't worry) -
we couldn't bring ourselves to leave our boy in her care any longer and enrolled him at a nursery 2 weeks early (whilst still paying her). 
Safe to say that within a couple of days we've had our confident boy back, who's keen on reading books and participates in every activity at nursery. In the morning he just walks in and waves good-bye. He's picked up more new skills in the first 2 weeks than he has in the 3 months prior, whilst our opinion as a parent is valued and valid.Our boy is also with another childminder one day a week, who he very much enjoys going to. 

Lastly, we want to mention that we offered Theresa feedback  after we took him out of her care, but this offer wasn't taken up upon. So we felt the need to leave our feedback here.

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• Communication