Eilmar Montessori School & Day Nursery Sidmouth Drive, Ruislip HA4 0DA

"It has taken me some time to write this review due to the undue trauma and stress that Rajan ( manager) and his mother Tina ( owner) caused my family, but I felt it only right and important to share our horrendous experience with parents who are considering this nursery or those that are currently attending and are unaware of the scandalous way in which they operate. My Daughter started attending Eilmar in 2019 when she 14 months old and we were relatively happy with the care provided by Trisha and her team. I would question the claim that they are a Montessori considering that only one member of the entire team are trained in Montessori, but regardless of this my daughter seemed happy. The problems arose with Rajan and Tina (nursery management) when our daughter was approaching 3 years and was starting to ‘benefit’ from the government funded 30 hours free child care scheme. I applied for the government scheme and reached out to Rajan to ask how financially this would affect our payments. My daughter attended 3 days a week costing around £900 a month and I was surprised that despite receiving ‘30 free hours’ a week our monthly payments were only reducing by roughly £300 a month. When I questioned Rajan on how this worked out he refused to give me an adequate explanation. However after seeking advice from friends whose children were attending other local settings I became more confused as to why I was still paying over £580 a month when for the same hours some where spending just £150-£200 with government funding. In order to make sense of the payments requested I questioned Rajan on what the 30 hours funding meant in monetary terms to him. He told me that he only received £2.50 per hour, per child on funding when his rate £6.60 per hour. That didn’t make sense to me why would the government claim to provide free hours if they are only providing the nursery a third of their hourly rate. So I reached out to the FIS team at Hillingdon council to seek further clarity, they informed me that Eilmar were actually receiving £5.80 per child. This meant that Eilmar were in fact profiteering from the scheme earning significantly over their standard daily rate when combining our payments with the funding received . The council intervened and tried to help us come to an arrangement that meant Rajan and Tina were abiding to the terms of a setting that accepted government funding. We worked out with the funding they were receiving we were happy to pay as a maximum of roughly £300 a month ( which we later were informed was still too much) this was accepted by Rajan and Tina and our daughter continued to attend, but word had got out amongst the other parents and quickly Rajan and Tina realised if they accepted they had to reduce our payments they would have to reduce others. So they went back on the agreement and also demanded back payments from the previous months. We of course refused and that’s when the threatening letters and fines began. I was 9 months pregnant at the time and I can’t describe the stress it caused me. Intervention from Hillingdon council didn’t seem to work so an investigation from their counter fraud team commenced but despite this, the threats of retaining our £600 deposit, throwing our daughter out of the nursery and daily fines continued. Once the fraud investigation concluded and the outcome was in our favour we expected at the very least our deposit to be returned but we never received it back as many others have not. Hillingdon however were fantastic and assisted with moving us to another setting with little notice but we are still very much out of pocket.This is an honest account of our treatment and just an attempt to help any others avoid this place. * in response to your response - if you weren’t found guilty of such fraud then why did the council reimburse us the money owed, I also have the letters to prove it. I’m a member of the Ruislip Mums Facebook group happy to provide evidence on there to any one who has questions."

"My son goes to Eilmar and he absolutely loves it! The staff are amazing and they have a lovely atmosphere! The activities are fantastic and he has come so far with his speech. When enrolling my son, everything was made clear to me. We are grateful to Eilmar for caring for our child and happy with the choice we made Donna"

"Following a recent visit to Eilmar I was surprised at how open and spacious the environment was. All staff in the nursery welcomed me with big smiles! Everything was made crystal clear to me! I would like to thank Eilmar for treating me as and individual and not a number."

"Our son has been attending Eilmar since he was 15 months old until now them he is starting school. We have been very happy with the care our son has been receiving at Eilmar as his confidence and social skills have developed really well and he is well prepared to start school. Food menu is varied from kids' favourite food to noodles with tofu and curries. The app is great for receiving information on his daily activities. They also have extra activities such as IT, Spanish and sports lessons. Eilmar also has good security arrangements and air conditioning which has been really needed during heat waves this summer."

"Our son started at Eilmar in 2020 as it was the closest Montessori nursery to home offering the hours we needed as full time working parents. Before his start date I had read and heard many negative reviews about the manager/owner of the nursery, and personally had a few people reach out to me to tell me about negative experiences with him. Given the manager didn’t have a hand in physically looking after our son day to day, we proceeded to send our son and see how it went. The staff responsible for looking after our son always seemed caring, but we did start to notice our son resisting going in to nursery in his last few months and didn’t seem to be enjoying it as much anymore. That, in addition to the below reasons, meant we took our son out of the nursery sooner than planned. 1. Communication about staff leaving/joining was non existent. That was a bit unsettling for us as we saw some of the best staff just disappear and new staff pop up with no introduction. 2. Inability for the manager to correctly calculate the deposit owed back to us. I’m on the fence as to whether this is a genuine inability to do basic math on the managers part, or an intentional means to take more than what is owed (please do read the many other reviews about withheld deposits). My advice is to record every single deposit payment via email and ask the manager to confirm receipt. 3. Rude condescending manager who barely says hello, shows zero interest in the parents and children, makes non-sensical policies and then lives by them as though someone else enforced them. The manager generally gave us a bad feeling from day 1 but we were largely able to avoid direct interaction with him for majority of the time. 4. An illness policy which did not make sense to us and enabled the manager to decide which policy applied based on his own judgement. To cut a long story short, we ended up having our son sent home to isolate for 5 days (while paying full fees) because he had a temperature reading of 37.7°. This was in March when the UK laws were relaxed! We were told that even if we produced a negative PCR test, he would still need to isolate for 5 days (he was negative btw). Laughable logic which was blamed, by the manager, on the DfE giving Eilmar “setting specific guidance”. I called the DfE and they confirmed they do not give setting-specific guidance. When we picked up our son his temp was nowhere near what they recorded and he was behaving perfectly fine. When we called to question why he had been sent home we were then told we could have given our son medication to bring it down just so we could try to bring him back in…?! This was the point where we immediately gave notice for our son to leave the setting. 5. A fee hike in Aug 2021, and another in April 2022 (and I’ve been told yet another one has just been announced). Basically fee increases whenever the management feels like it. The fees are more than nurseries rated Ofsted Outstanding in the area, for far lesser quality of service in my opinion. Our son has since started a new nursery and I cannot believe the difference in the way the nursery is run, and how amazing the experience and relationship with the nursery can be. We really missed out these past two years and I regret not moving nurseries a lot earlier. Please do look at reviews on the Facebook group “Ruislip mums”. It’s hard to determine real and fake reviews on Google but it’s much easier to see which reviews are coming from real profiles on Facebook. I would also recommend looking in to the Ofsted reports of the other nursery (Elms) owned by Swans Day Nurseries ltd, the company which owns Eilmar. [Addition] Our start date was not changed even once. I think you should be careful about lying on review responses. We only asked for an additional day (you were happy to accommodate) & an extra week of settling in which we paid for. In regards to threats, what on earth are you talking about?! Isn’t it funny you did not once mention that you or your staff were threatened until in this review? Ridiculous lies from a below par business."