When Jo Coles matched with Ethan in June, they hit it off instantly.
Ethan, an arts graduate, ticked all the boxes for Coles, who works in financial services. He was well-educated, fun and shared her interest in arts and crafts. Now he is nanny to her two children. They met on Koru Kids, a nanny network that is revolutionising childcare in a similar way to how Airbnb changed holidays.
The Hackney-based company launched in 2016 with £600,000 in seed funding (co-founder of Gumtree Michael Pennington was among the investors) and have just raised £10 million for expansion, bringing their total riased to £14.1 million.
“The matching process is easy,” explains Coles. “You sign up, select what you’re looking for, they give you bios to review. It’s a bit like online dating.”
Coles and her partner Am were in a “sticky situation” before they discovered Koru Kids. Both commute for an hour to the City every day and don’t get back to their home in Kingston until after 6.30pm most evenings, and most summer camps finish at 5.30pm at the latest. They needed someone to fill the gap.
This is Koru Kids’s USP: matching working parents with flexible, part-time nannies for those specific after-school hours — a previously “neglected” area of childcare, says its founder, former McKinsey consultant Rachel Carrell, who left her job in health tech to focus on solving the problem for families in the capital.
Now almost 1,000 Koru Kids nannies pick up children from schools in London every day. The £10 million fundraise was led by Atomico, which is one of Europe’s largest venture capital firms. Its partner Niall Wass will be joining the Koru Kids board. He wants to solve the problem of finding childcare being “painful, time-consuming and expensive”.
For Coles, the appeal lay in Koru nannies’ experience: the company accepts just six per cent of applicants and those who get through the process are given training in first aid, educational philosophies, homework and how to assess risk and safety around the home. Ethan had spent 18 months after-school nannying for another family of two boys and was about to start work as a teaching assistant. Another nanny they matched with was a retired teacher.
“That was a big selling point,” says Coles. “The fact that we could potentially have a qualified teacher looking after our kids and helping them with their homework is amazing — it almost combines the benefits of tutoring with childcare.”
The retired teacher was no chance find: “older” nannies, those over the age of 45, make up 32 per cent of Koru Kids’s workforce — a chunk that Carrell, 39, hopes to grow. Not only have many of these women spent years raising their own kids, but, crucially, they don’t want a full-time job.
It’s about finding someone who can do those “odd hours”, agrees Putney-based baby show director Zoe Bonser, whose nanny Sofia Papazoglou, 50, looks after the children from 3.15pm until 6 (“ish”) each evening while she and her husband are at work.
The set-up works for both parties: Bonser can adapt the childcare around her hours; Papazoglou, a Greek mother of two, can spend time with children, practise her English and fund her part-time art history course.
Papazoglou has authority with the kids, especially Jack, four, who can be a “handful”, says Bonser. “Sofia finds it amusing because she’s used to going through these phases with her own son.” This maturity and experience can be invaluable, says Carrell, recounting the story of a nanny in her sixties who’d been through the same health problems as the mother of the children she was caring for: “It made all the difference because she could explain what was going on to the kids better.”
Rewards can be wide-ranging for nannies, too: a chance to form a bond with a new family. “I missed working with children,” says grandmother Susan Mummery, 60, who looks after two brothers in Tooting. “I knew I had a lot of love and joy I could bring to some other little ones, but I was finding it hard to get back into work as I only wanted part-time a few days a week.” She says Koru Kids has given her back her confidence, and still leaves her with time to look after her own grandchildren.
Art gallery director Rebecca Eames says her sons have enjoyed having a “grandma figure” around the house in Hither Green. Solomon, nine, and Fabian, four, chose their nanny Tev, 63, over a younger Spanish student, and her influence has been “calming”.
“I thought they’d want someone young and full of energy, but actually, they like that calmness,” says Eames. “They like the boundaries, the rules, someone cooking them proper meals. She’s great at making them eat veg they say they don’t like, taking them to different parks, country houses, art shows.”
For Eames and her husband Vincent, Tev feels like “extended family”. Eames says: “She sent me a text this morning saying, ‘I missed them so much and I’d love to see the new house, do you mind if I come over?’ It feels like she genuinely loves being with the boys but her attachment is just right — it’s not smothering. She knows when to let the parents be in charge.”
It’s saved them money. With Eames’s last nanny, a privately-arranged student in her twenties, “we were fiddling around trying to make sure we gave her enough hours, which became awkward.” She’s comforted by the fact that childcare isn’t Tev’s main source of income.
Koru Kids “removes the awkwardness” of having to talk about money. The site takes care of payroll, taxes and national insurance. “I give them the money, they give it to her,” says Eames, who has a timesheet in the kitchen so “it’s talked about in hours not money. It’s less like a business transaction and more a personal one.” Carrell is always looking for new ways to help working parents save money on childcare. Last week, she launched the company’s nanny-share scheme, which allows two or more families to share a nanny, reducing the cost from £13 an hour to £9 an hour.
NHS manager Rachael Lake has spent the last year trying the service with friends in Blackheath. She and a friend share the morning school run, then their student nanny Lauma picks all four children up from school at 3.30pm, looking after them until 6.30pm — “two days at my house, two days at my friend’s house”. It’s saved them hundreds of pounds each and their children are now “like cousins”. “A brilliant win-win”, says Carrell, who has a son and a daughter.
“Each family pays less; the nanny gets paid more because it’s more of a job, and the kids get to spend time together after school.” One hundred families are already signed up and Carrell is confident it’ll become a “sizeable” part of Koru Kids. According to the firm’s research, nanny-sharing could create 30,000 extra childcare places across the capital. “There’s been a huge shift in the last five years with employers being more open to the idea of flexible working, but the childcare structure hasn’t evolved to complement that,” she says. Her mission is to keep building the childcare infrastructure that should exist: flexible childcare for flexible working parents, which gives work to a previously “overlooked” workforce in the capital — older women. “It benefits everyone.”
Koru Kids has partnered with the Standard to offer older adults in London free training to be an after-school nanny. This consists of an online course and, once they’ve been paired with a family, the company will then pay for a specialist paediatric first aid workshop and full DBS check. Visit korukids.co.uk/training
