Nursery boss reveals how she swapped the City for childcare business empire - and why Labour must 'help parents more'

For most people, redundancy after 12 years in the City would be a crisis, but for Caroline Popoola, it was the push she had been quietly waiting for.

Restless by nature, "every six to eight months I'm looking for a new challenge," she had spent over a decade as an insurance underwriter, feeling she had outgrown the role long before she left it.

Today, that same restlessness has built Alpha Child CareChild Care, a thriving group of nurseries and breakfast and after-school clubs operating across London.

Speaking to GB News, Ms Popoola shared how she swapped the City for a career in the childcare sector, and the trials and tribulations that come with the job.

When exploring new career options, a friend mentioned childminding, which Ms Popoola had never heard of before. The entrepreneur shared: "I thought what's that? Fast forward, I did a little research on it, and I decided, let's do this."

She began setting up her business at home and approached a local school. However, the first hurdle for Alpha Childcare was not financial but personal.

"The first thing was, oh, I didn't have any children. How am I going to look after children? The answer came from next door. "I had a neighbour.

"She has three children, and she's so skilled in being a mother, and I'm skilled in being creative and following policies and procedures.

"We just joined forces. I came up with the idea, she showed me how to work with children, and that's it." That neighbour is still with the business today.

Reaching out for support in this way set the tone for how Ms Popoola would manage her organisation and helped build trust with her wider team.

"I was so vulnerable with my team, to show them that look, I'm learning. I don't know it all, but I'm passionate. I love what I do," Ms Popoola said.

"Once I was able to be vulnerable and not pretend I knew the answer to everything, my team just gave me that leeway. They know she's passionate, our jobs are safe, she's going to learn as she goes along. We're all learning together."

21 years later, Ms Popoola now manages five nurseries across south east London, multiple breakfast/after-school clubs for children aged four to 11, and a holiday camp during the summer.

Her advice to other businesswomen, especially mothers, navigating running their own company or enterprise, is to "know who you are".

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She added: "Some people just like it easy. If you like an easy life that's not stressful, that means one business — you don't want to grow."

One of the inspirations for how Alpha Childcare operates as a business comes from an unusual place: McDonalds. Having worked there at 16, Ms Popoola noticed that the day-to-day workflows of the fast food chain were the same at every branch she worked in.

"They have a system in place that works. "Same thing for Alpha Childcare, I knew from starting my business, I want a system that works."

Her message to ambitious founders is the one she says nobody gave her: build the systems before you think you need them, "where you don't have to be in different places all the time, without being burned out, overwhelmed, stressed."

In a sector defined by safeguarding and trust, recruitment and retention are relentless pressures. Ms Popoola's solution has been to grow her own.

"As soon as I sense that strength in them," she explained, she begins offering ownership through either a room leader role, a management path, or "a sense of responsibility from the beginning"

Younger staff are brought in, trained, and rise into leaders who already understand the company's way of working, making each new opening easier to staff with people who carry the culture with them.

The proof is in the longevity. Ms Popoola has team members who have been with her for up to 20 years, some since six months after she started.

It is when the conversation turns to childcare funding that Ms Popoola becomes most impassioned with both parents and childcare operators feeling the squeeze of soaring costs.

She recalls that 18 years ago a full-time place cost around £1,041 a month; today she puts it nearer £1,800. The wider context is a sector under enormous strain even as support expands.

From September 2025, eligible working parents of children from nine months old can access up to 30 hours of funded childcare a week, a saving the Government values at up to £7,500 a year per child.

Yet many nurseries are struggling with rising costs, and some can only offer limited funded hours or raise fees for extras to stay afloat.

Her central concern is that good money already set aside for children too often goes unspent. She points to a holiday programme providing funded food and activities for disadvantaged children, a scheme she warmly supports, where places sometimes sit empty.

"The Government provides so much money for these free spaces, for these incredible, wonderful children that deserve it. The spaces are wasted. The money is wasted."

She believes she wants that funding to actually reach children, and believes that even redirecting a fraction of it into a modest discount for hard-pressed working families would see take-up soar.

"They'll be banging your door down. The parents who are working hard to make ends meet, they're contributing, and they should really get more help," the entrepreneur said.

According to the entrepreneur, her wish is for a system that encourages and enables more parents to work, so that families and children alike feel the benefit.

Notably, she is candid about why childcare costs what it does. Of all her nurseries and clubs, she estimates only a handful turn a real profit, with the stronger ones effectively carrying the rest.

The instinct of a "real businesswoman," she admits, would be to close the loss-makers. She won't. "I'm all for the children. I'm all for the parents," Ms Popoola said.

"Some parents genuinely don't have a choice; they haven't got that extended family to help them out. They need this."

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