Data Is the New Gold. Ofsted Already Knows It. Does Your Nursery?
In 2006, the British mathematician Clive Humby made an observation that has become one of the most repeated phrases in business: “Data is the new oil.”
Like oil, data in its raw form is not particularly useful. It has to be extracted, refined and applied before it creates value. And like oil in its early days, most organisations sitting on large reserves of it have not yet worked out what to do with it.
For nurseries, the parallel is closer than it might seem. Every enquiry a parent makes, every question they ask, every moment of hesitation before they book a visit — these are all data. And for most nurseries, every single one of those data points disappears the moment the conversation ends.
That is not just a shame. It is a competitive disadvantage that grows quietly, year after year, while the nurseries that are paying attention pull further ahead.
What the numbers say about small businesses and data
The gap between what data could do for small businesses and what it actually does is striking.
Research published in 2025 found that approximately forty percent of UK small and medium-sized businesses have no data strategy whatsoever — compared to just seven percent of large companies. Nearly two thirds of UK SMEs do not properly store their company data, meaning they lack even the basic infrastructure to begin drawing insights from the information their daily operations generate. Half of those surveyed acknowledged that increased access to data would help their business grow.
Approximately forty percent of SMEs report having no data strategy whatsoever, compared to just seven percent of large companies. This strategic void means that even when data is collected, many small businesses lack the framework to transform it into actionable insights.
This is not a technology problem. It is a perception problem. Most small business owners do not yet think of the information generated by their daily interactions with customers as an asset. They think of it as activity — conversations that happen and then are over.
The organisations that are growing fastest are the ones that have understood something different. Every customer interaction is not just a conversation. It is a signal.
What data-driven organisations actually do differently
The evidence on what happens when organisations start treating data as a strategic asset is consistent and compelling.
A McKinsey report found that data-driven organisations demonstrate EBITDA increases of up to twenty-five percent. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a fundamental difference in business performance, driven not by changing what an organisation does but by understanding it more clearly.
Research across industries found that sixty-two percent of organisations say that data and analytics give them a competitive advantage. The ones who say that are not necessarily larger or better resourced than their competitors. They are simply paying closer attention to what their customers are telling them.
In a survey by IDG, seventy-eight percent of enterprises agree that data strategy and analytics have the potential to fundamentally change how their business operates within the next one to three years.
The pattern is the same across sectors. Organisations that listen systematically to their customers grow faster, communicate more effectively and retain more of the families, clients or customers they work to attract. The ones that rely on instinct alone are always responding to yesterday’s information.
Why nurseries are sitting on more data than they realise
A nursery is, in data terms, an unusually rich environment.
Every week, parents contact the nursery with questions. They ask about fees and funding, about food and allergies, about what a typical day looks like, about how a child who is slow to settle will be supported. They ask things they have not been able to find on the website. They ask things that reveal what they are worried about, what they are hoping for, what would make them feel confident enough to book a visit.
Each of those questions is a data point. And most nurseries capture none of them in any structured way.
The manager who has run the nursery for fifteen years carries an extraordinary amount of knowledge about what parents ask and why. She knows, from thousands of conversations, which questions come up every autumn when new parents are starting their search, and which questions spike suddenly when something changes in the local community. She knows which concerns, if left unaddressed, tend to result in a family choosing a different nursery. She has adjusted her website and her welcome pack over the years based on things she noticed parents consistently struggling to find.
That knowledge is genuinely valuable. But it is entirely dependent on one person. Data assets are defined as data resources owned or controlled by an organisation that are expected to generate future economic benefits, demonstrating significant financial value for enterprises. The experienced manager’s instinct is not a data asset. It is a personal asset — and personal assets walk out of the door.
The specific value of conversation data
Not all data is equally useful. There is a particular kind of data that is especially valuable to a nursery — and it is the kind that most nurseries generate every single day without capturing any of it.
Conversation data is direct, unfiltered and self-selecting. When a parent chooses to ask a question, they are telling you precisely what is on their mind. They are not filling in a survey that prompts them with pre-set options. They are not leaving a review filtered through the lens of what feels appropriate to say publicly. They are asking what they actually want to know, in their own words, at the moment it matters most to them.
Customer insight is one of the areas where data has demonstrated its clearest value for small businesses. Market analysis traditionally required significant investment in surveys, focus groups and market research agencies — often placing smaller businesses at a disadvantage compared to larger enterprises. Data analytics offers a more cost-effective solution, allowing organisations to analyse real-time information and use those insights to tailor their communications, optimise their offering and identify new opportunities.
For a nursery, this means understanding what prospective parents genuinely care about — not what the nursery assumes they care about. Those two things are often different. A nursery might invest heavily in describing its outdoor learning environment, while conversation data reveals that parents are consistently more concerned about allergen management and what happens when their child is unwell. Without data, that gap is invisible. With it, it is immediately actionable.
The compounding effect — why data gets more valuable over time
There is a quality of data that makes it unlike most other business assets: it compounds.
A single month of parent conversations tells you something useful. Three months tells you something more meaningful — you begin to see which questions are consistent and which are seasonal. Six months tells you something genuinely strategic — you can see how parent concerns shift in response to external events, funding changes or local news. A year gives you a picture of the entire parent decision-making journey that no amount of instinct or experience could replicate.
The value of an organisation scales with the volume of available data. What is often less appreciated is that the value of data in making useful predictions ranges widely — and grows substantially as the dataset deepens over time.
This is what makes early investment in data capability so valuable for small businesses. The nursery that starts capturing and analysing parent conversation data today will, in twelve months, have an asset that cannot easily be replicated by a competitor who starts later. The insight is time-stamped, community-specific and continuously refined. It belongs to the nursery that built it.
What most nurseries are not yet doing — and what the ones growing fastest are
The nurseries growing most consistently right now are not necessarily the ones with the highest Ofsted ratings or the most impressive facilities. They are the ones that understand their prospective families better than their competitors do.
They know which questions parents are asking before they ask them. They know which concerns, if addressed clearly on the website, lead to a visit being booked. They know which topics their staff need to be briefed on before taking a parent call. They know, because their systems tell them.
To create strategic value from data, organisations must develop the capability to convert raw information into tangible business value. Fostering collaboration and effective communication of insights is essential — organisations that share data intelligence across their teams, rather than keeping it in one person’s inbox, build the kind of adaptive capability that sustains competitive advantage over time.
For a nursery, that means the insights from parent conversations need to reach the whole team — not just sit in a report that the manager reads alone. When the practitioner answering the phone on a Tuesday morning knows that food and allergy questions have been the most common topic in parent conversations for the past three weeks, she can lead with reassurance before the parent even has to ask. That small shift in communication — from reactive to informed — is felt by parents as attentiveness. And attentiveness, as we have explored in previous articles, is one of the strongest trust signals a nursery can send.
What Ofsted is now saying about evidence and continuous improvement
There is one more reason why nurseries should be paying attention to data — and it comes directly from the regulator.
In November 2025, Ofsted introduced a significantly updated Early Years Inspection Framework. The single overall effectiveness grade — Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement — was replaced by a new Report Card system, evaluating settings across multiple areas on a five-point scale. The new descriptors reflect a clear shift in expectation. The highest rating, Exceptional, is defined as sector-leading practice that is embedded consistently, with positive outcomes that are sustained and innovative approaches evident.
The word embedded is important. Ofsted is no longer looking for a nursery that can perform well on the day of an inspection. It is looking for a nursery that has built quality into its systems, its culture and its daily practice. It wants evidence not of what a nursery intends, but of what it does, consistently, over time.
The Ofsted Early Years Inspection Operating Guide, published in September 2025, is explicit on this point. Before an inspection even begins, inspectors are required to review the setting’s website and any information reported in the press or online. They are looking for contextual intelligence that tells them something about how the nursery communicates, what it prioritises and how it represents itself to the families it serves.
The guide also describes inspection as being built around a professional dialogue between inspectors and leaders — a dialogue that Ofsted expects to be informed, evidence-based and rooted in a genuine understanding of what the setting’s community needs. Leaders who can demonstrate that they know what their parent community is asking, what concerns are coming up most frequently and how they have responded to that information are describing exactly the kind of evidence-informed practice Ofsted is looking for.
The new framework also emphasises the importance of what it calls continuous improvement — the expectation that high-quality settings are always learning and refining their practice, not simply maintaining a static standard. A nursery that can show an inspector its monthly insight dashboard, point to specific changes made to its website and team briefings in response to parent conversation data, and demonstrate that its communication has improved as a result — that nursery is providing a compelling, evidence-based account of continuous improvement in action.
Data intelligence, in other words, is not just a business advantage. In the context of the new Ofsted framework, it is becoming a genuine marker of the kind of reflective, evidence-informed leadership that distinguishes the best nurseries from the rest.
The nursery that treats its conversations as assets
Here is what changes when a nursery starts treating its parent conversations as data rather than as daily activity.
The website becomes a living document, updated based on evidence of what parents cannot find rather than assumptions about what they need. The team is briefed monthly, not annually, on what is on parents’ minds. The manager can see when something in the external environment — a news story, a local health concern, a funding announcement — is starting to generate questions, and can respond proactively rather than reactively. New staff are onboarded with real intelligence about what parents ask and why, rather than relying entirely on informal knowledge passed down from the colleague who trained them.
Most valuably, the nursery accumulates an understanding of its community that deepens with every passing month. That understanding is not locked in one person’s memory. It is documented, shareable and durable.
That is what data does when an organisation decides to take it seriously. It turns individual moments — a question asked, a concern raised, a hesitation before booking — into something that lasts and that grows in value over time.
The gold was always there. Most nurseries just did not know they were sitting on it.
Dr Marcus Gottschalk is the founder of Shedlia, a Human + AI Behavioural Systems company that helps nurseries build trust with prospective parents through intelligent, always-available conversations. Every Shedlia system includes a monthly insight dashboard that turns parent conversations into practical intelligence for the nursery team. To find out more, visit shedlia.com or book a demonstration at meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/marcus-gottschalk.
