Norto5 KIDZ began in June 2006 when Peter and Carolyn Bird together with their son, Harley decided to begin a nursery school.

This seemed to be a natural product of each of their skills in that :-
* Carolyn had many years of experience in childcare, as a foster parent, a mother and then as a childcare practitioner.
* Peter is a Chartered Accountant so he is able to attend to the administration.
* Harley is a wizard with computers- and this site is in part testimony to his abilities in this area

Over the period since its inception, we have focused our attentions on growing the systems, staff and procedures to bring the settings to the point where your children are given the very best of attention in a safe and secure environment. We believe that we now have one of the best systems for monitoring the wellbeing of the children without taking the childcare workers out of their primary task of interacting with the children.

In 2008, we were given the opportunity to start a second school in the magnificent setting of the pavilion at the sports grounds in Whitemans Green,Cuckfield. It takes a long time to grow a school from scratch because once a family has decided which school to place their little ones in, they seldom change for the successive children as they grow up. We are pleased that the setting is now open full time from Monday to Friday.

We are further fortunate because we have a team of loyal and devoted staff. The majority of our staff has been with us since 2007- in fact Kim John who runs the operational aspects of the schools, was initially a parent at the school back in 2006. This stability is good for the children as they develop bonds with the staff. In addition, we have in place a key worker scenario where each child has a key worker associated to him or her. That staff member is responsible for the wellbeing of the children that they are mentoring - and it allows the parents to have a point of contact who is directly responsible for their child.

Most importantly, we have been blessed with an outstanding collection of outstanding parents who have stuck with us through the difficult times and we owe all of them a great debt of gratitude.

Childcare is a gratifying business in that we see the parents sometimes initially tentatively bringing their first bundle of joy to the nursery. We then see that child grow and take his or her first steps. Then comes the nappy training and the terrible twos- and before we know it, they are off to "big school". Our favourite times of year are the nativity and the graduation each year.