Ten years of Storal: in conversation with our Chief Executive, Sarah Mackenzie
Childhood friends Ashwin Grover and Varun Chanrai founded Storal in October 2016, and ten years on we are a group of more than 60 nurseries across the UK. To mark the anniversary, we sat down with our chief executive, Sarah Mackenzie, who joined Storal a little over five years ago, to talk about how far we have come and what comes next.
What drew you to Storal?
What attracted me to Storal was the opportunity. It was still a relatively small organisation, but there was a really clear belief that we could build something significant without compromising on what matters most.
I’ve spent my whole career in the sector, starting as an Early Years Assistant myself, so I knew that growth alone wasn’t enough to excite me. I wanted to be part of building an organisation that proved exceptional early years provision could sit alongside commercial success and scale. Storal wasn’t a finished product with decades of established ways of doing things, and there was an openness to challenge ourselves, learn and keep raising the bar.
How has Storal changed since you joined?
The scale of the change is quite extraordinary. I joined a Storal with fewer than 30 nurseries and many different approaches across the group. Today we’re a national group of more than 60 nurseries, caring for and educating thousands of children and employing 2,409 people. Each nursery keeps the individuality that makes it special, and we now also have a strong central infrastructure, including our own Storal curriculum.
The acquisition of Children 1st was undoubtedly the biggest moment of change. We brought 23 nurseries into Storal at once, which transformed the size and shape of the organisation almost overnight. There was an enormous amount of planning behind the scenes, but we were very conscious that for the children, families and nursery teams it shouldn’t feel like a corporate transaction. These were nurseries with their own history and deep relationships in their communities, so our job was to understand what was brilliant about Children 1st, preserve that and learn from it. I’m particularly proud that we kept so many of the people who had made those nurseries successful, and that quality stayed so strong through such a significant period of change.
Which moments from the last ten years are you proudest of?
It’s impossible to choose just one. Our quality record is certainly one. Coming to the end of the previous Ofsted framework with every one of our nurseries rated Good or Outstanding was something we all felt incredibly proud of, and the Exceptional and Strong judgements we’ve seen under the new framework have been really special too.
Bringing all of our team members together for our conference and awards late last year was another real milestone. It was the first time we had come together as one group since the Children 1st nurseries joined us, and there was something incredibly special about seeing everyone in one room.
Some of the moments I’m proudest of aren’t really milestones at all. They’re the things you see when you spend time in our nurseries, like meeting an apprentice who is about to qualify and seeing the educator they’ve become, or having a parent take the time to tell you about something one of our teams has done that really mattered to their family. Those smaller, very human moments are often the ones that stay with me the longest.
Was there a moment when you realised Storal was becoming something truly remarkable?
I don’t think there was one dramatic moment. One sign was seeing the consistency of our outcomes as we grew. Growth can expose weaknesses in an organisation very quickly, particularly in early years, because quality is delivered through people and relationships, and instead we kept seeing nursery after nursery demonstrate remarkable practice.
The biggest indicator, though, is when I visit our nurseries. Storal is now a large group, but you can walk into one of our nurseries, and it still feels unique to the community it sits within.
Alexandra Park feels like Alexandra Park, and Edgbaston feels like Edgbaston. We’re determined to keep that feeling as we grow.
Is there a story from our nurseries that has stayed with you personally?
Being a parent myself, and the parent of a child with SEND, has changed the way I experience some of these stories. When you hear from a parent whose child has additional needs that their nursery is the first place where they have felt their child is truly understood, that stays with you.
Often it’s one of our team who first notices that a child might need additional support. Sometimes they’re the person who helps a parent through a system that can feel completely overwhelming, and sometimes they’re simply the person who helps a worried parent feel that someone else also sees their child. Those things may never appear on a dashboard, but they’re some of the most important things we do.
Who has shaped Storal most over the past ten years?
There are far too many people to name individually, and that’s probably the point. Storal has been shaped by the people who have played a role along the way, who have grown with us and carried the culture through periods of enormous change. Thousands of children and families have shaped us too. Every time a family tells us what we’ve got right, or challenges us when we haven’t, it makes us better.
What excites you most about the future?
I genuinely think the most exciting chapter is still ahead of us.
We now have the scale and expertise to operate brilliant nurseries and to have a meaningful influence on early years more broadly. I want us to create some of the best careers in early years, where somebody can join Storal as an apprentice and see a pathway that could take them anywhere in the organisation. And I want us to keep growing, but with real discipline about how we grow.
I’ve seen how easy it can be, as organisations grow, for the distance between the people making decisions and the children affected by them to become too great. I never want that distance to exist at Storal. However large we become, the test of a decision should be very simple: does this help us give children a better start? If we can keep answering yes to that, while creating brilliant careers for our people, then I think Storal’s next ten years can be even more extraordinary than its first.
