Starting up a day care centre???

Hi ladies.

I thought some/one of you might know how I go about doing this??? I know there is a HUGE shortage of centres everywhere and it's always been a dream of mine to open one up but I don't know where to start!!

I live on the Hibiscus Coast so would want to open one up here.

I have a teaching degree (Primary) and have worked in Day care centres but the 'points' I earnt when I did work there are no longer valid so I am looking at retraining to get my ECE degree which I think will take a year (but won't do that unless I find out how to open a centre and actually do it!)

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks in advance

Edited by marielb

Thanks Mummy_Becks! Those are a great starting place for me :)

I just had a look through some of my education stuff. And to be a licencee you don't have to have a degree but at least some form of early childhood education training as if you need to be in the centre teaching you would need to be quailfied. You would need to have a degree as the licencee if you want to use your centre as a teaching centre and have students come in.

Things are changing with the staff you employ, they all have to be either trained or in the process of training now.

The more qualified your staff are the more government funding you get.

And some business education wouldn't be a miss either as you are running a business. I have a horror story about a daycare with a licencee that had no business sense at all (well no sense at all if you ask me ) if you want to know about that PM Mariel and I can tell you about that.

I can say that you do qualify to cross train and do the GradDip(tchg)ECE. I worked at the college of Education at Massey and they offer this programme extramurally both part time (2 years) and fulltime (1 year).

Def give the MoE a all tomorrow and ask them what you need to do.

You will more than likely need a resource consent from RDC to run the centre too - but this will depend on the exact location of your centre. Unfortunately these days, it can be an expensive & time consuming process to gain consent from the Council.

I am a planner & have been involved in gaining consent for a 10-child centre on the North Shore. It took approx 8 months to get consent & the owners had to go through a Council hearing for which they needed experts (a planner, lawyer, noise consultant & traffic engineer) to prepare reports & give evidence i.e. VERY costly .

And there are no guarentees that consent will be granted especially for centres in residential zones as the residents usually kick up a right royal stink. NIMBY at its best!

Sorry to sound so negative but I just thought I'd offer my opinion from a planning perspective. Best of luck.

I'd definitely rather hear all the negatives before I spend too much time investigating and putting money into anything!!! So thanks so much for your feedback

WOW Mel! 1.5mil!!!!!!!!! That is WAAAAAAAYYY more than I thought!!!

The case I was involved with probably cost the owners a similar amount too at a guess. I know they paid somewhere in the $900k's for the house which needed remodelling on the inside. They needed to buy a fairly large house on a large site. And of course while they were waiting on the consent, they were sitting on the property paying a huge mortgage.

Was definitely looking at a making a profit kind of centre

Aren't we all looking for a way to make more money these days

I have been looking out for one for AGES - years even! They NEVER come up and if they do I think they must be advertised secretly

What about approaching some existing centres to see if they'd consider letting you buy in?