I’m Rachel Carrell, founder and CEO of Koru Kids and also mum of 3 kids. I’m originally from New Zealand, but now live in North London. Before founding Koru Kids, I worked for ages at McKinsey and in health technology.

Until I had my first baby, my life made sense. You work hard, you advance. Then I discovered the (lack of) UK childcare system, and it felt like I’d run into a wall. It was 2014, I was having my first baby, all my friends seemed to be having babies too, and I had absolutely no idea what I was meant to be doing. Or how anyone else managed. It was so confusing (what’s a childminder? what’s an au pair?), bewilderingly hard to arrange, and there weren’t good tools to simplify the search. And no matter what you did it seemed to be unbelievably, eye-wateringly_, expensive. 

To make matters worse, I learned that some of the most common options, like nursery, just don’t work for lots of families – either it’s not as individually attentive as you hoped for, it’s double the cost if you have two kids there, or you just missed the boat and didn’t get your name down prior to conception (!)

I kept hearing horror stories from friends who weren’t happy with their choices but felt powerless to change them. Many moved out of London, or decided not to have another kid because it was so hard. I also saw lots of my female friends unable to go back to work, or making career choices they didn’t really want to make, just because they couldn’t find the right childcare. I felt deeply that this was unfair, and bad for society.

I decided to quit my job and dedicate my days to helping families find the right childcare so they can flourish. Childcare that creates awesome mini-humans, puts emotional wellbeing first, that’s easy to arrange and doesn’t cost the earth. 

That was almost a decade ago. Today I’m really proud of what we offer at Koru Kids. We started with wraparound care, then extended to full day professional nannies for babies and toddlers. Together we want to make sure every family can flourish with our help.

As an aside – I’m personally obsessed with child development. I’ve channelled this obsession into the Koru Ethos. Childhood lays the critical foundations for lifelong emotional wellbeing and so we want, via our childcare, to give your child tools they can use their whole life long. The Koru Ethos is woven through our candidate selection process, our training, our community, how we support our people day-to-day, and the core values of how we run our business.