Job Description
🍽️ Nursery Chef – CherryPark Nursery, Langstone Technology Park
📍 Location: Langstone Technology Park
🕒 Hours: 40 hours per week
📅 Contract: Full-time, Permanent, All Year Round
💰 Salary: £26,166.40 per annum
👶 About CherryPark Nursery
CherryPark is a vibrant, purpose-built nursery nestled in Langstone Technology Park, caring for children aged 6 weeks to 5 years. Our nursery features three dedicated rooms:
- Babies & Tiny Todds – 12 children/day
- Little Learners – 16 children/day
- Pre-School – 24 children/day
We’re proud of our 5-star kitchen, which caters to all dietary needs and provides nutritious, balanced meals daily. Our enthusiastic and caring team creates a joyful learning environment where children thrive through play and exploration.
👨🍳 About the Role
We’re looking for a passionate Nursery Chef who loves cooking and understands the importance of nutrition in early childhood. This is a fantastic opportunity to grow your culinary career in a supportive, family-focused setting.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Preparing fresh, age-appropriate meals daily with minimal waste
- Managing dietary requirements and allergies with precision
- Maintaining a clean, safe kitchen environment in line with hygiene standards
- Collaborating with nursery staff and parents to promote healthy eating
- Planning food orders within budget and ensuring consistent quality
- Completing hygiene checklists and updating cleaning schedules regularly
✅ What You’ll Need
- Proven experience cooking for young children (desirable)
- Sound knowledge of food allergies and dietary needs (essential)
- Understanding of COSHH and kitchen safety standards (essential)
- Ability to manage a catering budget effectively
- Relevant culinary qualifications (essential)
- Fluent English (written and spoken) – GCSE Grade C or equivalent
🌟 Why Join Family First?
We believe in supporting our team with meaningful benefits:
- Generous Annual Leave: 24 days + your birthday off + bank holidays
- Nursery Discount: 75% off fees for your own children
- Wellbeing Support: Confidential employee assistance helpline
- Career Development: Tailored learning and growth opportunities
Benefits are pro-rata for part-time staff and subject to probation completion.
🛡️ Safeguarding Commitment
We are dedicated to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children. All roles require an enhanced DBS check and thorough vetting as part of our safeguarding duty.
CherryPark Nursery is part of the Family First Group where we take great care to treat everyone as a person, with equal rights and responsibilities to any other individual, whether they are an adult or a child. We are committed to providing equality of opportunity and anti-discriminatory practice for all children and families according to their individual needs. Discrimination on the grounds of gender, age, race, religion or belief, marriage or civil partnership, disability, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, pregnancy or maternity, ethnic or national origin, or political belief has no place within the Family First Group.
Nursery Name
Why Join Us?
Established in 2019, we are UK’s fastest growing childcare provider and it’s our ambition to grow further by acquiring well run local nurseries that provide outstanding quality childcare and we strive to provide an enjoyable working environment for all our team. Whether you are working in one of our nurseries, or as part of our support team, you’ll feel part of the family. It’s always been like this, it’s in our DNA.
If you love childcare as much as we do, you’ll fit right in. We know that choosing your next career move is a big step, but fear not – our people are our most important asset and we make a big deal when it comes to taking care of you!
What Makes us Different?
From humble beginnings with a very small team, Family First began its journey with just 4 nurseries within London and has grown to 100 nurseries across the UK. Although we have grown, we have stayed true to our values, ensuring the highest possible standard of childcare, with a passion for developing our teams.
Our people are passionate about creating a special environment for all of the children within our care to flourish. Whilst there’s lots of hard work involved, to ensure that all our children are provided with the best possible standard of care, it’s the fact that we all love working with children, believe in what we do and have a lot of fun doing it that really helps us pull together, to create the highest quality of childcare that we’ve become famous for.
It’s the reason that parents choose to trust us with their children; because when you enjoy caring for children and seeing them develop into wonderful young people as much as we do, the feeling to have enriched someone’s early years journey is truly overwhelming.