The best you can bee: Busy Bees are working with Famly

From just one setting in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Busy Bees has grown over the last 40 years to be the largest provider of Early Years education and care in the UK. That kind of success doesn’t just come from maintaining the highest standards (98% of Busy Bees setting hold a Good or Outstanding grade from Ofsted), but from constantly looking for ways to improve. 

In fact, the desire to do better is embedded right from Busy Bees’ very beginnings. Co-founder, Marg Randalls, explains, “We wanted to give our children the best start in life, which to us meant better, more exciting care, stimulating environments, and lots of opportunities for play, interaction and development, at their own pace and in their own space. We couldn't find a nursery that offered everything we wanted. So, we decided to found it ourselves.”

But what does this continual striving for improvement look like in practice?

For Busy Bees, it’s their brand new curriculum, investment in stunning, modern environments, and streamlining their software. 

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From many apps to one collaborative Early Childhood Platform

Children can generate a lot of admin and there are a plethora of apps to help families keep track. The problems start when you have to work to keep track of all the apps you use to…keep track.

Luckily for their families, Busy Bees are always looking to enhance parents’ and carers’ experience and decided it was time to have access to everything in one place. And that place? Famly.

From now on, the Busy Bees parents and carers can view photos from their child’s day at nursery, request an extra session, and pay their fees, all without leaving the app.

And for the Busy Bees team and educators in the rooms? They can now find bookings, child development, billing, reports, and all their communication with families in the Famly platform. Not only that, but meals, key health information, and registers are all in one place too. Less time on admin means more time with the children, so everyone benefits. 

But why stop there?

Teaming up with Busy Bees means Famly can continue to develop even more amazing features for educators and leaders across the UK. In fact, we’re already working with Busy Bees to improve how funding is handled in Famly, introducing accident form reviews, enhancing curriculum features, and making improvements to parent purchases.

Early childhood is better together.

Most importantly though, it’s about better collaboration across the board. From the educators and leadership and families at Busy Bees to Early Years settings across the sector. With the UK’s largest nursery group and most collaborative Early Childhood Platform teaming up, we have a unique opportunity to work together for the good of the sector as a whole. 

Famly CEO, Anders Laustsen said, “It’s such an honour that Busy Bees has trusted us with one of its most important tasks: connecting tens of thousands of educators and hundreds of thousands of families every day. I cannot wait for those staff to feel the benefit of a system that gives them time back to spend on the stuff that really matters.

It was a perfect moment when I discovered our visions for the future of our businesses shared almost exactly the same language; to give a better start to life for every child. We believe it’s absolutely possible, and essential, for a platform like ours to serve everyone in the UK.

From the UK’s biggest nursery groups like Busy Bees, right down to the smallest packaway preschools, I hope our customers will trust us to keep delivering the best software on the market, with our continued investment into our product team in 2025 and beyond. Famly will never stop building.”