ABOUT THE NURSERY

Forbury Gardens Day Nursery is a privately run, high quality, professional child care service, catering in the main for working parents in the Reading and surrounding areas. We care for children from three months to five years of age.
We are open Monday-Friday throughout the year (except public & bank holidays). Full time places are most popular, 8.00am to 5.45pm, offering a particularly stable and settled environment for the children. Part time and half days may also be available on a regular sessions basis 8.00 to 1.00pm or 1.00pm to 5.45pm.

The Nursery utilises a very attractive flint school which was built in 1911. This replaced Reading's first Catholic school of 1840 built on the site of Reading Abbey, which once equalled the size of Westminster Abbey. The school bell is from the pre 1911 building. St. James school, as it was known, adjacent to St. James Church on Forbury Road, once educated 240 pupils ages 3-15 years. Gradually numbers declined so that it ceased to function as a school in July 1990.

	Applications were made to use the premises for offices, but an alternative bid to provide much needed child care was preferred. This was initially for thirty six children, opening in the September of 1991. During the first six months, the number of children on roll rose from one to thirty five, so the nursery was re-registered in May 1992 for forty eight children, this time under the Children Act (1989), which came into operation in October 1991. In January 1995, the nursery had its final re-registration to take it's maximum number of children, ninety five in total, forty eight upstairs and forty seven downstairs.