I have employed Emma as a childminder for approximately 6 years and until about a year ago when things first started to adrift I would (and had left) a good review. However I have decided to leave and honest and frank review of Emma for the information of other parents. Emma had in the past been good (improvements were needed). However Emma’s behaviour and professionalism has steadily got worse over a relatively short period of time. I have broken down my review in to the elements that most parents look at when considering a childminder:

Childcare

Emma’s priority is not the welfare of the children in her care, it is for her to make as much money as she can under any means (I will provide more detail on this shortly). I had paid Emma to do the school run, term time only. I would often get text messages and phone calls from the school to say that my child was late to school. Emma’s never gave a satisfactory response to this, rather just made excuses. Emma in my opinion is extremely disorganised due to the sheer number of children she attempts to look after. I was then contacted by the school to state that Emma never picked my child up from school on time, he was more often than not one of the last children left in the playground (and was often left standing alone in bad weather), because Emma could not organise herself properly. This is a serious safeguarding issue that so far Emma has refused to resolve. There is no structure to the care Emma’s care and the children are simply left to get on with it. There have been issues of bullying between the children which Emma does not deal with as it involves her own children, which leads to the smaller children becoming very upset. I recently had a terrible experience with Emma’s husband (who is regularly in the house when the children are there) who clearly has anger issues and became very aggressive and abusive towards me (which included making threats of physical violence against me), this terrified my child, the other children who were witness to it and myself, Emma did nothing to stop the situation and protect the children in her care. Any concerns you raise with Emma she will simply ignore completely or involve her aggressive husband to bully and intimate you into silence. Emma’s reaction to me raising concerns about the safe-guarding issues was to stop speaking to my child altogether whilst he was in her care, and have him standing by the door when I came to collect, and ushered him out the door and then to slam the door in my face (I was not even allowed to ask how my child was in her care). Luckily my child is old enough to tell me what had been happening. If this was a small child who was unable to communicate you might never know the extent of their unhappiness.

Fees & Contract

Emma is solely motivated by money, and shortly after signing the contract I was constantly harassed by her trying to increase fees and change the terms of the contract to get as much money as she possibly could, it became exhausting trying to manage this. Fees were due at the end of the working month / beginning of the following month as per her own contract, however Emma would constantly be asking for money early (she would bill me as early as the 18th of the month – bearing in mind our contract was that fees were only due for the days my child was in her care so she wouldn’t know what the rest of the month would look like) so would then start asking for money. In the approx. 6 years every bill was paid early or on time, but Emma’s constant demand for money early made it clear to me there were financial issues. Emma would also regularly overcharge and when you challenged her to say the bill wasn’t right, would reply with ‘my maths isn’t very good’, I never received an apology for this. I only started checking the bills about 12 months ago, and every single one I checked was wrong and she had tried to significantly overcharge. I am in no doubt this pattern had been going on for much longer.

Leaving your child with a stranger as a working parent is the hardest thing you will ever have to do. My advice after employing childminders for over 8 years is to interview as many as you possibly can and make an informed decision from there. There are lots of very good childminders in Yateley. However my personal advice would be not to include Emma in your interviews as in my opinion the care and environment she provides is not adequate and I have found her to be very unprofessional.

• Overall
• Setting
• Cleanliness
• Food
• Communication