How do I write a CV for a nursery practitioner job?

You have sent out applications to day nurseries and pre-schools, the sector is short of staff, and you are still waiting. That combination is confusing, and it usually has a specific cause rather than a general one.

In early years, silence rarely means "your CV was not polished enough". It usually means one of a small number of concrete things: the manager could not tell from the page whether your level 3 counts in ratio, your paediatric first aid is out of date or not stated, your availability does not fit the shift pattern the room needs, or you have experience with three-to-fives and the vacancy is in the baby room. Nursery managers are recruiting to fill a rota that is legally constrained. They read a CV to answer questions about staffing, not to admire it.

So write the CV to answer those questions, in the order a manager asks them.

Qualification status is the first thing, and it has to be checkable

Put your early years qualification near the top of the page, not at the bottom under education. Give the exact awarding body and title, not a summary. "Level 3" on its own is not enough, because not every level 3 counts.

Write it the way it appears on the certificate. For example: CACHE Level 3 Diploma for the Children and Young People's Workforce (Early Learning and Childcare pathway), NCFE CACHE Level 3 Diploma for the Early Years Workforce (Early Years Educator), BTEC Level 3 National Diploma in Children's Play, Learning and Development, NVQ Level 3 in Children's Care, Learning and Development, or the T Level in Education and Early Years. Add the year you completed it and the college or training provider.

This matters because in England a manager is checking whether your qualification is "full and relevant" for the age group, which decides whether you can be counted in ratio. The Department for Education publishes a checker on GOV.UK for exactly this purpose. If your qualification is older, overseas, or from a route that has since changed name, say so on the CV and say what the check returned. A line such as "confirmed as full and relevant for level 3 on the DfE early years qualifications list" removes a reason to put you aside.

If the Early Years Educator criteria your qualification sits under require English and maths at level 2, list them: GCSE grades or Functional Skills, with grades. Managers do look, because it affects whether you count.

If you are level 2, or mid-way through a level 3 apprenticeship, say that plainly and say your expected completion date. Plenty of settings recruit at level 2 deliberately. What loses you the call is a CV that is vague enough to look like it is hiding something.

The compliance block

Under the EYFS statutory framework, at least one person with a current full paediatric first aid certificate must be on the premises and on outings, and staff qualified at level 2 or 3 who joined since 2016 need PFA within three months of starting to count in ratio. Certificates last three years. So write: "Paediatric first aid (12 hour), expires March 2027". An expiry date is more useful than the word "yes".

The same applies to everything else a manager has to evidence in a staff file:

• Enhanced DBS with children's barred list check, and whether you are on the Update Service. If you are, say so — it can shorten your start date by weeks.
• Safeguarding training: the level, the provider or local safeguarding partnership, and the date. If you have been a Designated Safeguarding Lead or deputy DSL, that is a headline, not a footnote.
• Prevent duty training, level 2 food safety and hygiene if you handle meals or prepare bottles, and any specific health training you hold — EpiPen and anaphylaxis, asthma, epilepsy, allergy management, paediatric basic life support.
• Makaton or other signing, and the level.

Keep this as a short labelled block. It stops a manager hunting.

One more thing about safer recruitment. Many nurseries and all maintained nursery classes will ask for a full employment history with gaps accounted for, and will take up references that cover it. Do not leave unexplained gaps on the CV and plan to deal with them later. Write "career break, family caring responsibilities" or "retail role while studying" in a single line. An unexplained eighteen months reads as a problem to a manager whose recruitment is scrutinised at inspection.

How experience is evidenced in early years

The unit of experience in this field is the age range, not the year. A manager reading your CV is trying to picture you in a specific room. Make that easy.

For each setting, give: the type of setting (private day nursery, pre-school, maintained nursery class, children's centre, Montessori setting, forest school provision), the number of places it is registered for, the rooms you worked in and the ages, and your role in each. "Nursery practitioner, baby room (3 months to 2 years), 26-place private day nursery" tells a manager more than three lines of duties.

Then evidence the professional work itself in the vocabulary of the field:

• Key person responsibilities. How many key children, what ages. Say that you wrote and shared the progress check at age two, and how you handled it with parents.
• Observation, assessment and planning. Which approach the setting used — in-the-moment planning, continuous provision, topic or theme-based planning — and which framework guidance you worked from, Development Matters or Birth to 5 Matters.
• The systems you have used. Tapestry, Famly, Blossom Educational, iConnect, Connect Childcare, EYLog. Name them. A manager whose setting runs on Famly notices.
• SEND. Whether you have worked with children on SEN Support, contributed to individual plans or targets, worked alongside an Area SENCo, speech and language therapist, portage or the local authority inclusion team, or supported a child with an EHC plan. If you hold the level 3 SENCO award, say so.
• EAL and communication. Children with English as an additional language, the home languages involved, and what you actually did.
• Routine care. For baby and toddler roles, be explicit: bottle preparation and sterilising, weaning, allergy and dietary management, sleep room checks and records, nappy changing and intimate care policy, settling-in visits.
• Transitions. Settling new starters, room moves, and the handover to Reception, including school visits and transition documents.
• Parent partnership. Daily handovers, parents' evenings, stay-and-play sessions, home learning.

If you led a room, say the team size and what you were accountable for: rota and ratio management, deployment during lunch cover, supervising apprentices and college students on placement, ordering resources, running room meetings.

Ofsted and the things that carry weight

Ratios are the constraint the manager works inside, so signal your understanding of them. In England the EYFS statutory framework sets ratios by age — for children under two, for two-year-olds, and for three-year-olds and over, where the ratio depends on whether a suitably qualified level 6 practitioner is working directly with the children. You do not need to quote the numbers on a CV, but if you have held responsibility for maintaining ratio across a session, say it.

Inspection experience is worth a line. Give the setting, the grade it held and the year it was awarded, and what you did — for example, being the practitioner an inspector observed and spoke to during a learning walk, or leading the two-year-old room during an inspection. Be accurate about dates rather than implying a grade is current; Ofsted's inspection arrangements have changed and a manager will know when a report is from.

If you have contributed to safeguarding referrals, chronologies or record-keeping, say so carefully and without detail. "Made and recorded safeguarding referrals as deputy DSL, working with the local authority front door" is enough, and it is the kind of sentence that gets a CV read twice.

What practitioners routinely leave off

Six things, over and over:

1. Availability. Nurseries run long days, often opening around 7.30 and closing at 18.00, with early and late shifts. If you can do earlies, say it. If you can only do 8 till 4, say that too — you will be turned down faster, which is better than being turned down slowly.
2. Notice period and earliest start date. Rooms are being covered by agency staff while the vacancy is open. A start date is a selling point.
3. Travel. Whether you drive, and whether you are within a realistic commute. Local matters in this sector.
4. Agency and bank work. Practitioners often omit it because it looks fragmented. Do not. Group it as one entry, list the settings and age ranges, and it becomes breadth: "Agency practitioner, twelve settings across Leeds, ages 6 months to 4 years, baby room and pre-school".
5. Curriculum or pedagogical approach. Montessori diploma, Curiosity Approach accreditation, Reggio-influenced practice, Forest School level 2 or 3, Hygge in the Early Years. Settings that run these approaches advertise for them specifically.
6. Mentoring. If you have supported apprentices, assessed students on placement, or inducted new starters, that is the difference between a practitioner and a room leader in a manager's mind.

What to cut: a personal statement about being passionate about children's development, and a duties list that could describe any practitioner in the country. Both take space that age ranges and dates should be using.

If you are not in England

The registration picture differs by nation and it belongs on the CV. In Scotland, practitioners in a day care of children service must register with the Scottish Social Services Council in the appropriate category, so put your SSSC registration number and category on the page, along with your SVQ or HNC. In Wales, registration with Social Care Wales applies to early years and childcare workers — state your registration and the category you are registered in. In Northern Ireland, put your AccessNI check and your level 3 in your CV's compliance block. If you are applying across borders, say explicitly what you hold and what you would need to register.

What to do next

Take one advert you did not hear back from and read it line by line. Highlight every requirement that is checkable: the level and exact wording of the qualification, the age range, PFA, DSL, the hours, the start date. Then check whether each one appears in the first third of your CV, in the advert's own words. Most of the time, two or three of them are missing entirely and one is buried on page two.

Then fix the CV once, properly, with the qualification block, the compliance block with expiry dates, and settings written as type, size, room and age range. That version is the one you send everywhere; the only thing that should change per advert is which age range and which responsibilities you lead with.

If the tedious part is reading every advert closely enough to know whether you actually match it before you apply, jobmarket.pro does that reading for a candidate and prepares the application from a single profile it cannot add experience to.

And if a nursery asks for a completed application form rather than a CV, fill in the form. Safer recruitment means the form is the document that counts, and the CV becomes the thing you paste from.