Acorn Early Years is a charitable social enterprise with over 35 years’ experience of running children’s nurseries and other early years provision in and around the Milton Keynes area. We currently operate 17 day nurseries across four counties, several out-of-school clubs, forest schools, and also offer catering for other early years providers as well as training and consultancy.

We have over 470 employees and we look after over 2,000 children in our nurseries. As a not-for-profit organisation with a strong ethic of care, we put children at the heart of everything we do and our focus is on achieving social impact. We emphasise the benefits and importance of all children having access to outdoor natural environments and as a learning organisation, we place a strong emphasis on professional training and development. We operate a financial cross-subsidy model to achieve affordability as well as high quality, meaning that our expectations for each nursery to contribute to our centralised costs are adapted to their circumstances. This enables us to charge lower fees at nurseries in areas of deprivation, whilst still maintaining competitive salary levels in order to retain excellent staff teams, and to ensure that small nurseries maintain financial sustainability. Our Central Support Office provides each of our settings with direct access to specialist support and we are continually developing best practice and thought leadership in sustainable and ethical working practices in the early years sector.