£13.00 per hour | £27,040 per year
40 hours | 4 days a week | Permanent | All Year Round
Toddler Room | Brewood, Staffordshire
FULL TIME. FOUR DAYS.
Yep. That's the headline.
We're looking for a genuinely lovely, properly qualified Early Years Practitioner to join our Toddler team… and we're offering the full-time role across four days a week. That's 40 contracted hours, four longer days, and one whole weekday every week when you don't have to set foot inside a nursery.
Prefer five days and slightly shorter shifts?
We can do that too - 42.5 hours across five days. This particular vacancy is all year round and genuinely full time, though. So if you're looking for term-time-only, 9 - 3, or a 25 / 30 hour school-hours contract, we're probably not the right fit right now.
Still here?
Lovely. Now we can tell you why you might actually want to leave your current nursery for ours.
The rules changed. Our ratios didn't.
If you've worked in Early Years for more than five minutes, you probably don't need another advert promising you a “fun and rewarding environment with a passionate team.” You need to know what Monday morning is actually going to be like. So here's something rather more useful…
- We’re allowed to work at 1:5 with two-year-olds. We don't. We're still 1:4
- We've got four qualified teachers, which can allow different ratios in Preschool. We don't use 1:13 either
It turns out that changing a number in a regulation doesn't magically give a practitioner another twelve pairs of hands. We're deliberately staffed the way we are because Early Years is already a tough old job, we don't see much sense in making it harder simply because we're legally allowed to.
And yes, we know what the job is actually like, no worries there, The Little Big Nursery isn't part of a national chain, our Owner Manager started out on placement before becoming a Practitioner, Room Leader, Deputy Manager, Manager and eventually the slightly bonkers person who decided owning a nursery would be a sensible life choice.
So when we tell you we know how physically knackering, emotionally demanding and occasionally completely ridiculous this job can be, we aren't reading it from an HR handbook.
We've done it.
We still do it.
And we think the bigger humans looking after our little ones deserve looking after too.
Right. What are we looking for?
You already know the drill.
- Can you intercept a paintbrush approximately 0.7 seconds before a toddler decides to find out whether poster paint tastes as good as it looks?
- Can you conduct a perfectly professional parent handover while discovering you've got glitter in your hair, a pompom in your pocket and a questionable stain somewhere on your shoulder?
- Can you remain emotionally attached to a tiny human who bounced a wooden train off your head twenty minutes earlier?
Excellent. You'll fit right in.
More importantly, you'll need:
- A full and relevant Level 3 Early Years qualification or above
- Good knowledge of the EYFS, safeguarding and child development
- Experience working with little ones aged 0–5
- Confidence working as part of a proper team
- The ability to communicate brilliantly with little ones, families and other bigger humans
- To actually like Early Years
That last one sounds obvious. You'd be surprised.
So, what are you getting?
£13.00 per hour, giving a full-time salary of £27,040 for 40 hours a week. Your full-time hours can be compressed into four working days. You'll receive 5.6 weeks' paid annual leave, inclusive of bank holidays, together with a workplace pension. We'll pay for your required DBS and any work-related training.
Oh! we also offer a staff childcare discount… although in the interests of being completely upfront, we're currently very full and don't have additional childcare places immediately available. We'd rather tell you that now than put a shiny “staff discount” badge on Indeed and hope nobody asks.
Already working somewhere else?
Even better.
We're not expecting every good practitioner in Staffordshire to be sitting at home refreshing Indeed waiting for us to appear. You might actually quite like your current nursery. You might just be wondering whether somewhere better exists. So you don't need to formally apply before coming to see us. Come and have a nose around.
We'll happily arrange an after-hours visit so you can see the nursery, meet us, ask awkward questions and work out whether we're actually as different as we're claiming to be. No awkward commitment. No need to tell your current employer. No interview outfit required. If you like what you see, we can take it from there.
One last thing...
We're not looking for another name on the rota.
We're looking for someone who's good at this.
Someone who has chosen Early Years, understands how important the job is, loves the madness that comes with it and wants to work somewhere that hasn't forgotten there's a human being behind the qualification and job title.
If that's you, we'd genuinely love to meet you.
The Little Big Nursery Company Ltd.
Bargate Street, Brewood, Staffordshire ST19 9BA
Call 01902 939 101 to request an application form, or send your CV to hello [at] thelittlebignursery [dot] co [dot] uk.
Closing date: 26 August 2026
Appointment is subject to our safer recruitment procedures, including an Enhanced DBS check and satisfactory references.
Pay: £13.00 per hour
Benefits:
- Company pension
- Free parking
- On-site parking
Work Location: In person
