John Woodward, who has died aged 65 after suffering from a brain tumour, did much to enable a generation of parents to return to work. Not only did his chain of Busy Bees nurseries fill a gaping hole in the market for early years education when it was founded in 1984, but his pioneering childcare voucher scheme has made pre-school an affordable option for many.
Woodward recognised the financial burden that the high cost of childcare places on families. Now called Busy Bees Benefits, the scheme that he started in 1998 allows people to sacrifice a capped portion of their salary to pay for childcare – so parents can write off their costs against tax. It now delivers vouchers to more than 16,500 employers across the UK, ranging from smaller businesses to national organisations.
In 2015, he was appointed OBE for his services to early years education and recently he devoted himself to helping to solve the adult social care crisis, campaigning for a similar system of vouchers for elderly people.
Born in Walsall, John was one of the three children of Florence (nee Robinson), known as “Robbie”, who ran a grocery shop, and Ron Woodward, a salesman. John was educated at Shire Oak grammar school in the town and trained to be a teacher at Alsager College in Cheshire (1973-76) before starting his first job in education as a maths and PE teacher at TP Riley comprehensive school.
At Alsager he met Lynn Orme and they married in 1976. He joined Daw End school, Walsall, as head of mathematics in 1980, rising to be deputy headteacher.
Like all great ideas, Busy Bees started small. Woodward and Marg Randles, a teaching colleague at Daw End, were having lunch with their spouses at a pub in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1983. Lynn was pregnant and the four of them were bemoaning the lack of flexible, good quality daycare. So, for want of paper, they sketched a simple plan for the solution on the first thing to hand – the back of a beer mat.
The couples each sold their houses and bought a large property in Lichfield, turning the ground floor into a nursery and opening the doors of the first Busy Bees in March the following year. The two families and their children lived on the first floor, sharing the living space and their salaries, food, meals and parenting responsibilities. They also enlisted two other former teachers, David and Sally Thackray.
“We always laughed together reminiscing about the number of times we both met on the landing responding to the cries of one of the children,” says Randles. “We were painters, chefs, we dug drains, swept chimneys. We had no money and little business experience, but we had each other and the most wonderful time learning as we went along. Little did we know that the paint had hardly dried on the first nursery before John was looking at the next opportunity or that, in reality, he had considerably more nurseries in mind than just two.”
Busy Bees was sold to an Australian company, ABC Learning Centres, in 2006 for £71m, but the original partners bought back a large chunk of the business when the firm went bust in 2008. In 2013, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan became the third owners of the business, paying a reported £220m for Busy Bees and funding further expansion into Europe and beyond. Now the group has 358 nurseries in the UK and 300 more around the world.
Despite being diagnosed with a tumour last year, Woodward continued to lobby the government over his adult social care voucher idea.
He is survived by his second wife, Ruth (nee Pamplin), whom he married in 2006, his son, Steven, from his marriage to Lynn, which ended in divorce, two stepchildren and his sisters, Jacqui and Pat.
• John Woodward, teacher and businessman, born 11 April 1955; died 9 September 2020
