Walk into most nurseries and you will find a keypad by the door. Punch in four digits, the door clicks, you are in. It feels secure. It is mostly theatre.
Think about who knows that code. Every current member of staff. Every member of staff who has ever worked there. Probably a few parents who watched someone type it. The cleaner. The handyman. The agency cover who did three shifts last spring. The code almost never changes, because changing it means telling everyone the new one, and that is a hassle, so it doesn’t happen.
Now ask the questions that matter. When was that code last changed? Who actually knows it? Does the member of staff who left in 2019 still know it? In most settings the honest answers are “no idea”, “more people than I’d like”, and “yes”. A lock that everyone past and present can open is not access control. It is a doorbell with extra steps.
For a nursery, the stakes here are higher than for almost any other kind of business, because the thing behind the door is children.
Ofsted and CIW expect you to control who has access to your setting and to be able to demonstrate it. “We have a keypad” is not a convincing answer when the code has not changed in three years and nobody can say who knows it. Safeguarding is built on knowing exactly who is in your building and being able to account for it, and a shared, unchanging door code makes that impossible.
When you can show that each person has their own access, that it is removed the day they leave, and that you have a record of who came and went, you are not just more secure. You are demonstrably meeting an expectation inspectors care about. That is a much stronger position than hoping the code question never comes up.
There is a particular version of this worth calling out, because so many nurseries have one. The little metal lockbox by the door with a key inside, opened by a code. Or the safe in the office. Or the alarm panel.
Same questions, same uncomfortable answers. When was that code last changed? Who knows it? Does someone who left years ago still know it? These boxes often hold the keys to everything, the master key, the alarm fob, the petty cash, and they are protected by a code that has the same leaky history as the front door. If you do one thing after reading this, go and change those codes, and write down the date you did it.
The fix is to give access to people, not to share a secret. Modern access control replaces the shared code with individual credentials, a fob, a card, or a phone, one per person. That single change solves almost everything that is wrong with the keypad.
When everyone has their own credential, a few things become true at once. Removing someone’s access is instant and affects only them, so a leaver loses entry on their last day without anyone else being inconvenienced. You get an audit trail, a record of who entered and when, which is gold for safeguarding. You can restrict access by time, so the person who only works mornings cannot get in at 9pm. And you never have to change a shared code again, because there is no shared code.
For nurseries, the system we recommend is Paxton. They are a UK manufacturer, which matters for support and longevity, and their systems are built around exactly the things above: per-person credentials, a full audit trail, time-restricted access, and cloud management through Paxton10 so you can grant or revoke access from anywhere rather than standing at a panel by the door. It is a genuine, proportionate step up from the keypad without being enterprise overkill.
For nurseries that run on Nursery Genie, Octopus 365’s access control integrates directly into the management software, so the people side and the door side talk to each other rather than living in separate worlds. When the systems know who is staff and who has left, the door can act on it automatically.
You may meet other companies offering access control and CCTV, and one of them, Almas Industries, may well be exhibiting at the Summit. They do this work too, across CCTV and access control, and it would be daft to pretend otherwise.
So here is the honest version. Octopus 365 is not chasing general CCTV and access control work. It is not where our specialism sits, and we would rather tell you that plainly than oversell. Where we are genuinely strong is the join between your physical access and your nursery’s systems and data, particularly for settings using Nursery Genie, where access control and management software work as one. If a full CCTV and building-wide access project is what you need, a specialist like Almas may be the better fit, and we will happily say so. If you want your access control joined up with the rest of your nursery’s IT and data, that is exactly our patch.
We would rather point you to the right answer than win work we are not the best people for.
A door code that has not changed in years and that every former member of staff still knows is not security, and for a nursery it is a safeguarding gap as much as a cyber one. Give access to people, not to a shared secret. Even before you change a single lock, go and change the codes on your door, your lockbox and your alarm today, and write down the date. That one act closes the most obvious hole while you think about the bigger fix.
Octopus 365 has supported nurseries since 2011, and James has worked with early years settings since 2009. If you’d like to talk through joining up your door access with the rest of your nursery’s systems, or just where to start, get in touch any time. No hard sell, just a conversation.