A nanny’s role is to provide a safe, caring and stimulating environment for children, with age-appropriate activities and opportunities to enable them to flourish emotionally, socially, physically and intellectually. A nanny will also undertake general nursery duties such as tidying children’s rooms and play areas, managing the children’s laundry and preparing healthy, home-cooked children’s meals.

DAILY NANNY

A daily nanny is a childcare professional who will come to your home to take care of your children, usually while you are not at home (sole charge), although some parents will work from home. A daily nanny will normally work weekdays for up to 10 hours a day. Any additional babysitting can be arranged at an additional cost.

LIVE IN NANNY

A live-in nanny will usually work weekdays but for slightly longer hours (11-12) than those of a daily nanny. A live-in nanny contract may include one or two nights of babysitting a week and if additional babysitting or weekend work is required, this can be agreed for an additional fee or days off in lieu. Families provide live-in nannies with their own bedroom, use of either a private bathroom or one shared with the children, and food.

NANNY SHARE

In a nanny share arrangement, the nanny is employed by two families and provides childcare to both. This may involve the nanny looking after children from both families at the same time. This type of nanny share can be a good way of keeping childcare costs down. Although a nanny is paid more for a nanny share, the costs to the families are still lower as the nanny’s salary is shared between the two families.

Another type of nanny share is when the nanny looks after the children from one family for certain weekdays and the other family’s children on the remaining weekdays. This option can be useful if you only require childcare for part of the week.

A third option would be if families shared a nanny who had sole care of each set of children for part of the week and overlap childcare on other days of the week.

TEMPORARY NANNY

You may need a nanny for a short period of time because your usual nanny is unavailable, or you are waiting for a nursery place to become available. Whatever the reason, we can help you find the right nanny for your needs. Our temporary positions run for between one and six months and nannies are paid by the hour.

MOTHER’S HELP

A Mother’s Help works alongside the parent(s) providing care for the children plus completing nursery duties, light housework (e.g. loading and unloading the washing machine) and helping with the family cooking. Mother’s Helps are not usually left in sole charge of the children as they do not have the same qualifications or level of experience as a nanny.

This really depends on a number of factors, such as whether the role is part-time or full-time, how many days and hours you are offering, the skills and expertise you require of your nanny, etc. We recommend getting in touch with us as soon as possible in order to talk through the process, and to decide together when the best time to start searching would be. The majority of nannies will have notice periods of between 1-3 months in their current roles, hence why we suggest contacting us as soon as possible. That said, we can also fill positions at short notice so please get in touch if you have an urgent childcare requirement.