Building Scalable Homebased care through an Innovative Scalable Quality Management System

tiney is the UK's leading childminding agency (2% market share of homebased care) providing its platform services to 800+ passionate childminders. The Early Years Alliance, which represents around 14,000 providers in England, said the sector was facing its worst crisis in recruitment and cost increases in 20 years (BBC, 2022). According to the Institute for Public Policy Research the under-utilisation of women's skills cost the UK economy £13 billion a year (IPPR, 2016) and, 25% of children worldwide compromise their lifelong learning potential by not getting access to quality pre-primary education (UNESCO, 2023).

tiney's primary end-users are childcare professionals seeking support to operate their home-based childcare business. However, our ultimate end-users are the children receiving the care. tiney helps childminders deliver care through high-quality standards to children for their parents. tiney has an ambition to be the UK's largest provider of high quality childcare. We also believe we can support the creation of high quality childcare internationally. We are already the fourth largest provider of childcare in the UK, and we are well advanced in France.

Whilst nurseries are expensive to operate, they achieve a customer experience that parents trust. Home-based care on the other hand, is much more affordable for parents but struggles to offer a consistent customer experience and as a result parents don't trust it (Mirror, 2020). There are over 30,000 registered childminders at present however research shows that issues around quality assurance (QA) such as safeguarding and regulatory compliance have a significant negative impact, discouraging people from becoming childminders (Hohmann, ECER 2021). The most innovative part of tiney's model is the way in which it sets out a path to change this, creating new supply in the process.

Tiney has registered over 800 childminders to date. In order to scale operations, tiney now wants to develop an industry level innovation to digitalise its quality framework and build scalable quality assurance processes through its existing platform. This will involve building a number of new platform capabilities, that when put together achieve a whole new level of home-based quality assurance that the industry has never seen. This will be delivered through our existing platform to ensure provider adoption, regulatory compliance, and ultimately parental trust.