A box of treats in the staffroom can matter to your team more than you might think. But there’s a difference between a treat that lands on top of a team that already feels supported, and one that’s trying to do the job that a real conversation should be doing instead.
In this blog, we help you distinguish between hollow gestures and strategies to prioritise your practitioners’ wellbeing. Sharing a layered, practical approach to supporting your nursery team’s mental health.
It’s more than a demanding job
Working in early years is demanding in ways that don’t always get named out loud.
Your practitioners are regularly holding the distress of children who are struggling, children who may be living with trauma, instability at home, or developmental difficulties that are only just beginning to be understood.
There’s a small but increasing pool of data surrounding young children’s mental health needs. Research is only just beginning to scratch the surface on uncovering the risk factors noticed in EYFS that can predict mental health challenges later in life.
But, whilst the data catches up, your nursery team are supporting children with the most complex and layered needs, often without expert mental health guidance. For your practitioners to support the children in their care effectively, they too need their own support infrastructure.
Naming it out loud
Acknowledging the emotional toll the role brings in a team setting is more powerful than any number of treats on the staffroom table.
The children in your care are in the midst of a major neuroplasticity change, which, in turn, can present as challenging behaviours (understanding the science behind self-regulation can help your team navigate these times).
When staff hear a nursery manager acknowledge a particularly challenging day or week, it signals that your setting is one where people don’t have to struggle in silence.
Managing your stress and others
Our 2025 Childcare Sector Survey, confirmed what we know to be true. The people most likely to be absorbing that pressure on behalf of their teams are managers and directors themselves, with 92% reporting that the current landscape is affecting their mental health.
Staff mental health and wellbeing isn’t a light topic, and it doesn’t have light answers and simple fixes. What it does have are practical solutions and a layered approach to prioritising your team’s happiness.
What a layered approach to staff wellbeing looks like
Supporting your team’s mental health involves a combination of strategies that work together.
Think of it in three layers:
The culture:
How your setting feels to work in day to day, the conversations that are normalised, and whether staff feel seen and valued
The structures:
The systems, software, policies, and processes that reduce the mental load for all and provide the structure needed to ensure your nursery is designed to succeed
The specifics:
The individual considerations that affect your team members personally (hormonal health, vicarious trauma, life stage, and external stressors)
Get the culture right and the gestures land properly. Get the structures right, and the culture has something to stand on. Miss either, and even the best intentions don’t hold up under pressure.
The culture: how your setting feels to work in
Given that 69% of respondents in the Ovivio Childcare Sector Survey anticipate challenges with recruiting and retaining staff, effective culture isn’t a vision statement on the wall but the hundreds of small things that happen every day that tell your team they’re working somewhere that respects them.
Your nursery team is unique, but there are a few common themes every effective working culture has:
- Credit where credit’s due
- Celebrate your practitioner’s individual skills and talents.
- Involve staff in decisions that affect their day
- From how staff meetings are structured to how the staffroom is set up, involvement builds investment.
- Make professional development feel worthwhile
- With 47% of settings prioritising staff development in their 2026 strategy, this is the year to follow through in a way that feels meaningful rather than mandatory.
Our Ovivio survey found that 35% of respondents are already using more than one strategy to manage their mental health. Meaning people in your team are likely already finding their own ways to cope, possibly quietly and alone.
A setting where practitioners can confide in their leaders about their own capacities and limits is a nursery that values trust, honesty and effective leadership.
If you haven’t taken an honest look at your workplace culture from your team’s perspective, our nursery workplace culture quiz is a useful starting point.
The structures: the foundation for kindness to stand on
Simply wanting to support your team’s mental health isn’t enough on its own.
The early years settings that do it well have deliberately designed structures that reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, especially in high-pressure moments.
Policies
A wellbeing or mental health policy that nobody knows about isn’t a policy, it’s a document. It needs to be visible, referenced at induction, and revisited regularly so staff know what support is available and how to access it.
Mental health training
Having at least one trained mental health first aider in your setting means there’s a named, qualified person staff can go to before things escalate.
It’s worth noting that only 3% of respondents in our Ovivio Childcare Sector Survey turn to external professional support when managing their own personal stressors. Having a trusted first point of contact on your nursery team can make it feel far less daunting for your staff to take the next step and chat to a mental health professional.
Processes
Clear, consistent processes for things like rota planning, requesting leave, notifying leaders of absence due to illness, and sharing important information reduce the low-level uncertainty that quietly drives stress.
People
Make sure every team member knows who to go to and when, whether that’s a room leader, a mental health first aider, or one of the leadership team.
Communication and feedback
Regular supervision, team meetings with space to talk and share concerns, and a route for anonymous feedback mean everyone is given a voice in your nursery setting. Effective communication channels are a must-have for any well-run nursery.
The specifics: individual considerations that matter
Get the culture right, get the structures in place, and then it’s worth zooming in on the individual things that can affect your team members that a general wellbeing policy won’t automatically cover.
There are two areas in particular that the early years sector has historically been quiet on, and both are worth addressing directly.
- Menopause and hormone cycle support
- Vicarious trauma
The workforce in the early years is predominantly female, with a wide age range, from school-leavers to experienced practitioners in their 50s and 60s.
Perimenopause and menopause symptoms (brain fog, anxiety, disrupted sleep, fatigue, changes in confidence)can look like disengagement or poor performance if a nursery manager doesn’t know what they’re seeing.
A setting that’s committed to supporting staff through the menopause creates a very different kind of psychological safety for all team members. Similarly, recognising how hormone cycles will affect your team helps to build an environment of understanding and care. The nurturing environment you work so hard to build for children deserves to extend to the people caring for them, too.
Vicarious trauma
Working closely with children who’ve experienced neglect, abuse, or significant family breakdown has a psychological cost that rarely gets recognised in early years and education.
Without space to process it, it accumulates. A non-negotiable skill every practitioner will have in abundance is empathy, which can make it difficult to leave emotionally challenging situations at the door.
Regular team and individual debriefs, even brief ones after a difficult day or incident, can offer the support many practitioners lack.
Practical takeaways for nursery managers
Build a culture where people don’t have to perform
Make it explicit that staff don’t have to pretend everything’s fine when it isn’t. As with everything, this is learned through modelled behaviour. How you handle pressure visibly in front of your team sets the tone for everything else.
Check how you communicate under pressure
The way a manager delivers feedback, responds when someone raises a concern, or visibly handles a stressful day tells your team far more about the culture of your setting than any policy does.
Pair people up informally
Consider pairing team members so there’s always someone to debrief with who isn’t a manager. It takes the pressure off you as the sole point of support and builds connection within the team.
Make space for flexibility where you can
You can’t always offer flexibility on hours, but you can build a culture that tries. Letting a team member see their own child’s school play, or organising the rota so someone can make a family commitment, costs very little and means a great deal.
Put wellbeing on the agenda
A standing two-minute slot in your team or individual meetings where people can flag how they’re doing collectively normalises wellbeing conversations and means you’re not only hearing about problems once they’ve already escalated.
Signpost external support
Whether that’s NHS talking therapies, or simply a reminder that support exists, don’t bury support in a policy. Say it out loud, regularly, so it feels like something staff are encouraged to explore.
Don’t forget yourself
Ironically, the person most likely to read, save and share an article about supporting staff mental health is often the least likely to apply any of it to themselves.
As a nursery manager or owner, you’re absorbing significant pressure on behalf of your team, often without the same structures in place to catch you.
In a single-site setting, that can feel isolating. You’ll want to be open enough to model the culture you’re trying to build, without leaning on your team for support that should come from elsewhere. A professional network, a peer group, or external support like a therapist can make a real difference to how sustainable this role feels long-term.
At Ovivio, we’re committed to being a trusted voice in the early years sector, sharing practical, honest advice for the people running nurseries day-to-day. If this blog has been useful, there’s plenty more on the Ovivio blog covering everything from Ofsted readiness to financial planning and staff development.
And if you’d like to talk about how nursery management software can take some of the admin pressure off your plate, giving you more time for the things that matter, we’d love to hear from you.
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