Another day working but it was a day of two halves.
This morning I worked from home and after responding to emails and completing some banking I went over my cash flow prediction from yesterday to make sure I'd accounted for everything and I was still happy with my proposals.
Then this afternoon I went into work specifically to chat with my deputy manager about our plans for the upcoming new academic year starting in September. Normally by now we would have completed our long term plan and be busy organising new starters to come and visit us but this year it's all a bit different.
Our new regulations mean that we cannot have visitors in pre-school as they would be 'breaking our bubble' of staff and children so this means using social media and chatting with new parents over the phone instead. The big unknown at the moment is what September will bring in the way of new or amended regulations, which makes forward planning a little trickier than normal.
One side effect of the lockdown is that our number of new starters for September is very low; I think this is a combination of parents genuinely not thinking too far ahead (I think we are all a little out of sync with our previous lives!) and then there is also the financial impact of 12 or more weeks of reduced, or no, income.
The knock-on of lower numbers of children unfortunately has a direct impact on the number of hours that I can offer my staff to work and that has been my focus the last couple of days. A balancing act of being fair to my team while ensuring I have the correct number staff working at any given time in relation to the number of children in attendance as well as making sure we can financially afford to do what we need to do! But I think I have got there...fingers crossed.
As my day had been split in two we decided to take our usual walk out this evening instead; it was probably a good idea as it was a little cooler than it had been at lunchtime although not by much...my car read 34 degrees Celsius (thats's 93 Fahrenheit) at one point!
A lovely way to finish out our day; we are truly blessed to have this gorgeous scenery on our doorstep and this has been one positive to take from these past few months. We have slowed down our pace of life, been forced to venture out where perhaps before we would have been too busy doing something or going somewhere and we now have a greater appreciation of our surroundings and our time. Much better to spend the time together, connecting and enjoying the countryside than running headlong into life and not appreciating what's right there in front of you.
Take care out there,
xx
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