Bow Bears Pre-School CIO Out of School Clubs

In April 2022, a new Head Teacher started at Bow Community Primary School. During our first meeting I explained Bow Bears future plans of having a purpose built building and being able to offer wrap around care as well as all year provision.

At the time we were open 9.15-3.15 Tuesday to Friday term time only and had a good working partnership with the local childminder.  During this first meeting the head mentioned that she had a space that we could use should we wish to start wraparound before having our own building.

We are currently located in a village hall that has other users every evening meaning that we can’t extend our offer from that location.

In May we got the news that the childminder was no longer going to do daytime care so there would be no early years offer within the village for Monday’s.  A quick phone call to school later and we had the beginnings of a plan. After all the necessary paperwork, form filling, jumping through hoops and Ofsted inspection were complete we were good to go!

We launched Bow Bears Out of School Clubs from Bow Community Primary School plus a Monday pre-school session from the same space. We offer breakfast club from 8-9am Monday – Friday and after School club Monday – Thursday.  We started after school club Monday – Friday but only had one family needing it.

When they said they no longer required it in the November we took the decision to only offer the 4 days. The first term was fairly quiet, and we knew that we’d make a loss, but school were so supportive we couldn’t have asked for any more. From January 23 we tried offering a themed club each night, e.g. one night was STEM, another art and craft and so on. This brought in a few more children but the word was getting out and more working families started using our services. We had two members of staff running each session and by the summer term we had 15+ children two evenings per week.

From September 23 we have 3 members of staff for 3 evenings a week. We have started an ad-hoc booking system on Book When which has 5 extra spaces per session for emergency care. Wednesday’s are so busy we’ve had to stop taking ad-hoc bookings for the time being.

This academic year we have also started offering holiday club, 2 days per week during the school holidays. We offer 20 places per day, 8.30am-5.30pm and we are nearly full to capacity each time.  If the need arises for additional holiday clubs, we will offer them.

We took a leap of faith when we decided to offer the wrap around care and although the first year was mentally and physically hard it is so worth it. We now get to see children that attended Bow Bears for their early years so they already know us and we have a relationship with their parents/carers. It’s also lovely to meet new children that attend Bow Community Primary School.
18 out of 37 children at Bow Bears access some form of Out of School provision now.

We accept and actively promote Early Years Funding, Tax Free Childcare payments and Childcare Vouchers for any hours used meaning that parents get the most they can for their money.