Nursery, Wraparound Care and Clubs management systems

[DavR]

Does anyone have any experience with separate Nursery, Wraparound and/or Clubs management systems?

 

We're using Arbor to manage ours at the moment, but it's falling short in so many ways and doesn't look like there's any significant development of their Clubs module planned, and with the new requirements on Nursery Invoicing that the DfE dropped in January, we're in the market to potentially buy a standalone product.

 

Names we've heard speaking to other providers include iPal, Class4Kids and Famly.

 

Thanks!

[TheHyperTechie]

One of our schools moved from Kindersoft > Famly for their nursery management system.

 

I didn't have much involvement other than the initial setup, however, I have heard they really like using it. 

Edited May 7 by TheHyperTechie

[Danp]

After years of using SOCS for wraparound and clubs, I've just moved one school over to Involve and love it.

[AlistairB1983]

Probably not that helpful/insightful, but my son's nursery uses Family and it seems to be a very intuitive system and we've never had any issues regarding receiving/paying invoices.

 

Obviously what it's like to run/manage from the other end, I've no idea. But the nursery has been using it for years, so I'm going to assume it's not THAT bad at least!

[blinky4311]

For our nurseries we use Famly, we use it at 2 sites and it seems to tick all the boxes and requires very little IT involvement. Their support is pretty dire though.

 

For our main school we use https://freshapp.net/childcare-booking-system/, it allows parents to book in for before/after school wrap around care.

 

 

[DavR]

Quite a few folks out there using Famly - are your schools using it just for payments and bookings, or are you using the curriculum, activity journals and home-school comms aspects too?

 

It does look very full feature, but, Nursery specific. We were hoping to get one product to cover both bases tbh.

[blinky4311]

I spoke to our Nursery manager last week and she said they use it for everything. The only thing they have started using on top is CPOMS for safeguarding.

 

However, we only use Famly for the Nursery so I can't comment on if it would be any good outside of that setting!

[DavR]

Yeah, I did kinda get the impression that Famly operated pretty much as a full standalone Nursery MIS. 

 

We put that one aside for the moment, because it wouldn't integrate directly with our actual MIS, Arbor.