Royal Air Forces Association revamps Longhoughton nursery to support military families

RAFAKidz is a subsidiary of the Royal Air Forces Association, a charity that supports the RAF community. They are focused on providing affordable and high-quality childcare and support for military families rather than making commercial profit.

RAFAKidz Boulmer is the charity’s tenth nursery across the country after it took over the previous childcare business and prides itself with providing specialist support specifically for military families.

Pam Cave, operations manager for nurseries in the north, said: “Our ethos is around supporting military families, so we try to keep our prices as low as we possibly can while still paying our staff a decent salary to attract the best staff that we can possibly get.”

“Any profit that we do make, and hopefully we will make a little bit more profit this year, is completely reinvested back into the nurseries.

“If we ever get to the point where we’ve reinvested and there’s a surplus, it will go straight back into our parent charity which supports serving personnel and veterans and their families.

“The Royal Air Forces Association does a lot of really good work,so we’re really, really proud to be a part of that.”

The nursery’s primary objective is to care for military children. When full, admissions policy states they need to be at least 90% filled with military children, however they do take on children from non military families as well.

Thanks to funding, roughly £40,000 was spent to completely redecorate and deep clean the space from top to bottom with new resources, furniture and toys. The total makeover received a positive response from both families using the service and the staff.

“It really is absolutely cracking,” Pam said.

Katie Atkinson, manager of RAFAKidz Boulmer, who has worked at the nursery for 11 years before it was taken over, said: “We're a small team but really passionate about the place and I think to come to an organisation and they're also passionate about the children, the parents, the family and the staff, that just makes us feel even better”.

RAFAKidz Boulmer is located close to the RAF station and it currently has spaces available. The nursery can be contacted on 01665 661148.