tiney supports home-based people to become childminders and to run more effective businesses. Our core focus is to eliminate many of the headaches typically associated with running an independent childcare business, including payments, communication, EYFS training and support. We are registered with Ofsted as a Childminder Agency with Unique Reference Number (URN) CA000038.
These Childminder Terms of Use set out your rights and responsibilities as a tiney childcare provider to ensure the best possible experience for you and for the parents who engage you. They also set out provisions which will apply to prospective Childminders, who are not registered with tiney but who are using pre-registration features of the tiney platform (such as onboarding or training content).
In these Childminder Terms of Use we may use capitalised words and phrases. When we do, these have the meanings given in our General Terms of Use, which apply to our contract with you in combination with these Childminder Terms of Use.
1. How It Works
At tiney, in our role as a registered Childminder Agency we support a community of Parents and Childminders, matching Parents with carefully-selected Childminders and, through our various Services, providing the tools and infrastructure to simplify contracting, billing, messaging and the other day-to-day aspects of engagement between Parents and Childminders. However, the contract for childcare services is between the Childminder and the Parent – we are not part of that transaction, although we may facilitate it. The contract between the Childminder and the Parent will be made on a standard agreement to which we require all our users to adhere (we call this the Childcare Agreement).
2. Checks and opening your account
Checks and vetting
All prospective Childminders must be pre-approved by us and vetted to ensure their childcare offering is suitable. We may change our vetting and approval processes from time to time, and we may refuse any prospective Childminder for any reason.
Opening your account
Assuming that our pre-account vetting and approval requirements are met, we will require you to provide necessary personal and business information in order to create an account, including your name, contact details, and organisational details. You will be asked to provide an email address and password. You will be asked to provide your mobile phone number as part of the onboarding process.
By way of reminder, our General Terms of Use set out certain terms relating to the information you provide to us and to account security and our Privacy and Cookie Policy sets out details of how we may use that information.
Pre-registration content
Even before you register with tiney in our capacity as a Childminder Agency, we may make certain features of our Services available to you through your account. In particular, we may make some onboarding and training content available to you to make sure that you understand our Services and have been through pre-registration training.
3. Registering with tiney
Your offer
If you have completed pre-registration training, and are offered to register with tiney and open up your own childminding setting, your offer is conditional upon:
- Satisfactory references and successful onboarding checks (e.g. evidence of identity and qualifications, DBS checks, Local Authority checks and a health check from your GP).
- Your home setting meeting our quality and safety standards during our home visit. At a minimum, your home must: have well-ventilated rooms with comfortable temperatures; have a clean, bright designated play area; have play equipment which is clean and safe to use; be a non-smoking home; and have smoke alarms installed and working.
- Your continued compliance with the Terms, and in particular your use of the tiney app and Services in connection with all childcare services you provide. You may not provide childcare services without the use of our app and Services.
- Your compliance with the requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage and Childcare Register.
- Your agreement that tiney will charge a service fee to cover the great benefits you’ll receive as well as your registration with us in our capacity as a Childminder Agency.
- Your agreement to, and signature of, any supplementary agreements or quality commitments which we may request in relation to your registration with us.
If our offer decision is brought into question for any reason and needs to be reconsidered, we reserve the right to withdraw the offer at any time.
Supplementary Terms
When we make an offer to you for pre-registration training, or for registration, we will ask you to agree to certain offer commitments and registration commitments. We might also issue supplementary terms to you from time to time (for example, in relation to specific benefits, features of our platform or loyalty schemes). All of these terms, once agreed by you, will be binding, so it will be a condition of your use of our Services that you fulfill the commitments you’ve agreed during the offer and registration stages. We will provide you with, or you can access, copies of the offer and registration commitments (and if relevant, other supplementary terms) for your records after you have agreed to them.
Support and benefits
We may offer support and benefits to our registered Providers. We can’t guarantee these and might withdraw them or change them from time to time. We don’t guarantee any specific results from the benefits (e.g. that training will lead to specific accreditations or marketing will lead to guaranteed business). We are also not responsible for the performance of third parties like insurers to whom we might introduce home nursery providers.
Childminder Agency
If you join tiney, legally, you will be registered as a childminder with our Childminder Agency. This means that tiney will be responsible for Quality Assurance visits to your setting and providing you with ongoing training and development. Tiney itself is registered with, and inspected by, Ofsted.
You will only become formally registered and begin working with families after you have completed all checks, all initial training and had a home visit from a member of the tiney team. We will then advise you whether you and your setting are suitable to be registered with tiney.
Your Employment Status
Please note, your relationship with tiney does not form a contract of employment. Your tiney home nursery will be your own independent business and you will have autonomy to manage that business.
### 4. Working with us and with parents
Matching parents and childcare providers
Once you have provided us with all necessary information, we may market your availability through our Services, and through other online and offline media to prospective families. In conducting that marketing, you agree that we may use your name, image and any other descriptive content you have provided to us. We do not guarantee that any volume of work will arise from our marketing efforts.
You will follow our family onboarding process, which gives you and the Parent the opportunity to meet each other. Throughout the process both you and the Parent will always have the right to change your mind and not proceed with the proposed engagement. As part of this process, we will solicit from the Parent and from you all necessary information which is required to be documented in the Childcare Agreement (such as the details of the Parents and children, details of care to be provided, fees and additional charges, and any special arrangements).
Parents you may introduce
It is a condition of your continued use of our Services, and your registration with us in our capacity as an Ofsted-registered Childminder Agency, that you use our app and Services in connection with any childcare services you provide. This is in part to ensure that we are able to meet our regulatory and safeguarding obligations in monitoring the services you provide. If you wish to provide services to any parent or guardian you must refer them to tiney so they can be onboarded to our platform. We will then follow the same family onboarding process as described above in relation to Parents we match with you.
The Childcare Agreement
Once the onboarding process is complete, you and the Parent will be required to enter into the Childcare Agreement. You are not permitted to vary the Childcare Agreement in any way without our prior written approval. If there are any specific contractual arrangements which you and the Parent wish to agree in relation to your engagement, then we will try to accommodate them.
Rates and billing
You will be able to set your hourly rates and change this from time to time. We will assist you in negotiating rates with prospective families.
When negotiating with prospective Parents, we will act as an intermediary in the negotiation of the Childcare Agreement, which will detail the hours of care, rates and invoice timings.
We will invoice Parents on your behalf for the childcare services you have provided in accordance with the Childcare Agreement. Any additional fees incurred during any month (such as additional hours, late pick-ups, meals, outings etc.) will be added to the following invoice.
The Parent is responsible for payment of their invoices, and we will not be liable for late or non-payment. In the event of any dispute, we will provide you and the Parent with reasonable assistance to help come to a satisfactory conclusion.
When a payment is made for an invoice by a Parent, tiney will process these funds and hold them for you in your name in your 'Tiney Wallet'. The Tiney Wallet is an e-money bank account, legally held in your name. You can see your balance, monitor your transactions and withdraw these funds to your nominated UK bank account on an ad-hoc or scheduled monthly basis via the tiney app.
To provide the Tiney Wallet services, we have partnered with Modulr Finance Limited to provide e-Money services in the tiney app. Tiney Limited is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as an EMD agent of Modulr, which means we are licenced to distribute or redeem electronic money (e-money) and provide certain payment services on behalf of Modulr. Your use of the Tiney Wallet is governed by the Modulr Introduced Client Terms and Conditions.
We charge you a service fee on all payments made by Parents to you. This fee covers the various services that we provide to you as your Childminder Agency. The fee is deducted at the point at which the funds enter your Tiney Wallet. The details of the fee you pay will be made clear to you at the point of registration with tiney. We may revise our fees from time to time by no less than eight (8) weeks’ notice.
You are at all times responsible for accounting to the appropriate authorities for any taxes which may apply to your earnings under any Childcare Agreement.
Your general obligations
In order to ensure a consistent and high quality customer experience, we require all tiney home nurseries to comply with certain basic standards. In particular:
- You will perform your obligations under the Childcare Agreement in a professional manner, and will treat the families with whom you deal in a professional and courteous manner.
- You will comply with all requirements of Ofsted, the Early Years Foundation Stage and Childcare register, and any other laws, regulations or statutory guidance applicable to you.
- You will notify us of any contact you receive from Ofsted or any other regulator regarding any upcoming inspections, complaints or other issues relating to your childcare business.
- If we issue any other guidance or standards to our tiney home nurseries from time to time, you will comply with it or them.
Data protection
You will comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (as transposed into UK law) or any successor legislation related to data protection, and will ensure that you have provided the families with an appropriate privacy notice and secured all necessary consents in relation to personal data you may receive and process in providing your childcare services. We may assist you by providing a template privacy notice – if we do, then you are responsible for ensuring that it is accurate and suitable for your business. You might find this Help Centre article useful to you in relation to your data protection obligations.
When you put personal data on the tiney platform, whether it relates to you, to the children you look after or to parents or guardians, tiney will be a data controller in relation to that personal data and we will handle it in accordance with our Privacy Notice at https://www.tiney.co/privacy.
For some of that data which relates specifically to records of your childminding services (for instance, learning and developmental records in the Journal part of our platform), both you and tiney will be data controllers jointly – us, because we use the data for our own purposes, and you, because you do, too. In relation to any of that data, both you and we will comply with our respective obligations under data protection law. If you receive any data subject rights request in relation to data on our platform (e.g. if a parent asks you to delete all data relating to their child or asks you to provide a copy of all data relating to that parent) you will notify us immediately. You agree that we will handle and respond to that request on both our behalves, and you will provide us with whatever support or assistance we might reasonably request to handle it.
Feedback
We may ask you to participate in feedback from time to time as is reasonable as a condition of our offering you our Services. The form of feedback may vary, and might include surveys through our Site or App, in-person meetings or calls among other methods.
Using our Services
You must use all available functions of our Services in your dealings with Parents wherever possible. In particular:
- all messages between you and Parents relating to your childcare services should be sent using the secure messaging features of our App wherever possible;
- all bookings and rescheduling should be made using the relevant features of our App wherever possible; and
- all invoicing and payments shall be conducted through us.
Confidentiality
In your role as a tiney home nursery, we may share with you information which is confidential to tiney, such as information relating to our plans, technology, users, business, finances or personnel. Equally, you might share with us information which is confidential to you (such as information regarding Ofsted inspections or your own business plans). In each case, we’ll call this confidential information and you and we each agree that in relation to the other’s confidential information:
- it will be used only in connection with the exercise and performance of your and our respective rights and obligations under the Terms; and
- it will not be disclosed to any third party, except to insurers and legal and professional advisors under obligations of confidentiality. As an exception, we may disclose your confidential information to our freelancers, consultants and service providers under obligations of confidentiality to the extent necessary for us to conduct our business. Also, you or we may disclose confidential information as required by law.
Reporting
In the unlikely event that a major concern relating to any aspect of the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework’s requirements is flagged by tiney or is brought to our attention, we are required by law to follow the appropriate reporting procedure in relation to Ofsted and the Local Authority
### 5. Term and Termination
Termination by you
Our contract with you will be formed on your acceptance of our Terms. You may terminate that contract at any time by no less than six (6) weeks’ written notice to us. You must notify any relevant Parent of such termination at the same time.
Note that if you are a fully registered childminder who has decided to end their registration with tiney, then the terms in the Childminder Deregistration Process will apply.
Termination by us
We may terminate our contract with you as described in our General Terms of Use.
Effect of termination
On termination of our contract with you, we will immediately cease to provide you with the Services. We will stop marketing your services as a Provider and will make any data hosted by us on your behalf (such as messaging data) available to you for transfer within thirty (30) days. After that thirty (30) day period, we will not be under any obligation to you to preserve any data or records relating to your services (but may do so to the extent necessary for our own lawful purposes or to comply with applicable law).
Termination of our contract with you will automatically give rise to termination of the Childcare Agreement at the same time, in accordance with its terms.
Last updated: 12th July 2022