Most of the negative reviews about explore focus on how sales based the company is, how little explore actually cares about education, how bad the hours are or how upper management uses emotional manipulation to force you to work extra and whilst all of these things have long been true it’s worth focusing on the last few months. Pre-lockdown we were expected to keep working in our centres despite explore failing to provide us with any cleaning equipment. Our ceo sent out a video for parents saying how we were regularly cleaning whilst knowing most centres had run out of cleaning resources and that our supplier was unable to provide anymore. We were encouraged to bring from home or make our own cleaning equipment. The ceo then began doing Boris Johnson style announcements in which he would give a list of all the centres still managing to sign people up in the crisis despite the fact most of us felt unsafe and at risk as most the centres are inside busy sainsburys stores or shopping centres. Once they eventually did close we were given four days to launch our online work. We were told it was all hands on deck and had to work over a full weekend and late evenings to train all our staff, book in all our families and prepare for the indefinite closure of our centres. After the late nights and weekend work that most of us were never compensated for, you’d expect some sort of thanks from the upper management. No. We again got a video stating that one individual had signed up loads of kids to the new system and at the end it was mentioned that around 150 people would be furloughed. Obviously this is to be expected but the way in which it was handled was awful. We were told on a Friday evening and didn’t find out who was at risk until the following Tuesday. Managers were then given feedback if their centres fell behind despite the fact the workload for at home was higher than in centre and we were now doing it with less man power. Explore then commenced a second round of furloughs leaving around half the centres with just one manager meaning you were basically on the clock 6 days a week. As well as reducing our staff and increasing our workload, explore launched a new year initiative 9 weeks in a row for the at home service which resulted in us having to call around 200 parents a week, train our whole team and explain to upset parents why that thing we said they couldn’t have two weeks ago was now happening. Once the system was up and running properly they began to rush a return to centres but not without simultaneously undertaking redundancies. The redundancy approach was laughable, senior leadership gave each region (around 25 staff) an hour teams call where they said how devastated they were about making 200 redundancies, pretended to cry a bit then fielded all the hard questions to the regional managers who were also going through redundancy. Initially we were told we wouldn’t be likely to work our notice it made redundant and that all changed once explore decided they were going to bring in more new initiatives, ramp up their sales and create a centralised at home team. Redundant staff were expected to undertake all of this whilst fighting for their jobs. It should be noted that explore also missed every deadline in their redundancy pack leaving staff nervous, confused and feeling a lack of trust. Finally, they reopened all their centres illegally as they hadn’t read the government guidelines on voluntary childcare settings. All staff had to call round parents and book in sessions, force our tutors back into work regardless of their family situation and put ourselves at risk only for somebody to report explore for reopening whilst it wasn’t allowed and we had to close again and repeat the process two weeks later. To anybody considering working for explore, there are some pros but until a change of senior management takes place the company culture is one of self congratulations, incorrectly focused and mean spirited.
