Happy Days Day Nurseries is a progressive and highly professional group which is registered with OFSTED and is a member of the Cornwall Early Years Development and Childcare Partnership. Happy Days provide high quality childcare and believe that every child should have the best possible start.

The organisation, which has 20 sites throughout Cornwall , employs qualified Nursery Teachers, who are supported by fully qualified Nursery Nurses. All the staff undertakes regular and appropriate training and they have recently received their 4 th recognition by "Investors in People". One of the main aims is to provide a safe and secure environment for the children and they are constantly reviewing their facilities to improve this aspect of their service.

Early in 2004, with all the above criteria in mind, the management decided to review their security requirements and started to look for a product that would help to ensure the safety and security of both the children and the staff. Steve Richards, the Development Manager, looked at a number of conventional CCTV systems, but because they were proposing to keep the images for up to 3 months, he kept coming up against the usual problems of picture storage and the cost implications.

"What we were looking for, was a simple and cost effective way of recording and storing details of all the activities which had taken place in our nurseries each day. We felt that this approach would give both parents and staff 'peace of mind' and could also provide proof of good practice for OFSTED", says Steve.

They finally found the ideal solution in SafeGuard , a Nursery Monitoring and Security System from RedHand , which offered a new approach to digital surveillance.

Instead of using video, SafeGuard utilises small, unobtrusive digital network cameras to take two high quality pictures every second and store them as standard Jpeg images, straight onto the disc of a networked PC or file server. Bandwidth needs are small and the performance of the network is not compromised. All the internal and external activities are captured and are stored securely for up to 90 days. An intelligent Viewer module makes it easy to locate and manage their pictures.

Happy Days have already found that the system serves as a useful, automatic incident log which supports standard nursery records. SafeGuard has improved nursery security and is also becoming an important aid to staff training. Because it is designed to meet the specialised requirements of nurseries and childcare centres the system helps them to meet their "Duty of Care" responsibilities to both children and staff.

Robin Karkeek, Managing Director of Happy Days Nurseries based in Newquay says, "We have installed the system in our flagship nursery and it has proved to be a tremendous success. We are pleased to endorse SafeGuard and we are in the process of rolling it out to all our other sites."