Canopy Children’s Nurseries

Canopy Children’s Nurseries are passionate about giving children the best possible beginnings and helping to bring more harmony into parents’ busy lives by offering a supportive, nurturing day care service that’s tailored to each family’s needs.

The team at Canopy describe their child-led approach to early years’ education as recognising what is unique, special and individual about each child so that they can support and encourage them to be the best version of themselves.

By building a culture of excellence and designing environments and planning experiences to inspire a child’s awe and wonder, Canopy Children’s Nurseries create magical childhood moments. 

Whilst each nursery is an entirely child-centred environment, Canopy Nurseries have been developed with the needs of modern parents in mind who require higher levels of security, convenience, flexibility and ethical credentials than ever before.

The Canopy concept was sown two decades ago when founder, Sarah Beattie, was researching childcare for her own babies and decided to create the nursery that she was searching for.  Since then, she has run three nurseries where the common theme has been a culture of excellence and a celebration of the magic moments in childhood.

This approach has proven highly successful and Sarah used lockdown as an opportunity to develop the Canopy brand and launch the Canopy Children’s Nurseries franchise.

Sarah describes the Canopy approach to franchising as highly collaborative. This means that each Canopy Nursery is developed in partnership with the franchisee so that it reflects their personality and passions in order to become truly fulfilling.

Canopy has also been recognised when it won the BFA’s Emerging Franchisor award in 2023.

This sophisticated new nursery brand and franchise is already operating successfully in Wembley Park, Shrewsbury and St Albans are now operating successfully, with more nurseries taking root in Potters Bar, Cricklewood, Leicester and Chelmsford.

The mission of the Canopy team is to disrupt the landscape of childcare provision by giving children the freedom to choose and the power to play so that they can change the world in their own unique ways.

The Canopy franchise package includes:

• Property services to include finding the right premises in the right area, architectural and planning expertise, interior and external design services.
  
• Regulatory licence: Coaching and support to acquire the Ofsted licence and credentials required to run a nursery.
  
• Training: Early years consultants and business professionals will guide you through a variety of internal and external training modules covering nursery practise and management.
  
• Website: Your page will be published so that you can start promoting your services and capturing customer enquiries at the earliest stages of your nursery development.
  
• Marketing: Prelaunch marketing plan and package to include digital marketing services to promote your nursery in your area and to drive traffic to your website page, together with PR and social media content. A launch event.
  
• Nursery Systems: Set up, training and coaching on nursery systems which includes an all-in-one nursery learning, assessment and management software system as well as HR, Health & Safety and finance systems.
  
• Operational Support: An Operations Manual and toolkits of useful resources are coupled with the level of mentoring and support from the Canopy team that you need in order to succeed.

Daily life of a franchisee

Whilst much of the day-to-day management of a nursery can be delegated to its management team, the franchisee must remain highly visible to staff/customers and highly involved in the performance of the nursery.

Core tasks for the franchisee include marketing the nursery in the local community, recruiting and motivating a high-performing team, managing the finances and overseeing the smooth management of the nursery.