The question kids activity operators keep asking
There's a question I hear from school aged childcare providers constantly, in our customer onboarding and support calls, at sector events, in emails that arrive on quiet Tuesday afternoons. It almost always takes the same form: How do I get more bookings?
It's completely reasonable. But I've come to think it's not quite the right question. The more useful question, the one that actually unlocks the answer, is this: what is the parent I'm trying to reach actually doing when they decide where to book?
That shift matters. Because parents don't all arrive at a booking the same way. DfE's Childcare and Early Years Survey 2024 found that 58% of 5–7 year olds in England used formal childcare, millions of parents making these decisions every year, each in their own way.
From what we observe through the thousands of wraparound care and holiday club providers and their families who book online using Enrolmy, three distinct patterns account for the vast majority of bookings. Understanding them tells you not just how to attract more families, but which parents book, and what you need to get right to get your activities in front of them.
Table of Contents
- The question providers keep asking
- The Interest-Driven Parent
- The Convenience-First Parent
- The Word-of-Mouth Parent
- What this means for your programme — and your marketplace presence
The Interest Driven Parent
Picture this: it's a Sunday evening. The children are in bed. A parent — let's say a mum — opens her laptop with a specific mission in mind. Her nine-year-old has been obsessed with coding for the past six months. She wants to find a summer programme that goes deeper than a generic "screen skills" workshop. She types something like "coding camp for kids aged 9–11 Manchester" and begins comparing options.
This is the Interest-Driven Parent. She is not in a hurry. She reads. She scrolls to the bottom of the description. She notices whether the provider has bothered to spell out what her child will actually do — not vague language about "developing digital skills," but real specifics: what they'll build, what languages they'll be introduced to, how many children per instructor.
She's comparing. She's looking at age ranges carefully — nothing puts her off faster than a programme listed as "ages 5–16" with no further breakdown. She's checking whether there's any evidence of quality: professional photos, testimonials that feel genuine rather than templated, a provider who seems to have thought carefully about who their programmes are for.
The Interest-Driven Parent books in advance, is the most likely to return the following year, and is the most likely to recommend your programme, but only if the experience genuinely met the standard she came in with.
For providers, she's the clearest signal that programme descriptions are not a box-ticking exercise. Every word of your listing is part of her decision. Vague and generic will lose her before she's finished the first paragraph.
In the DfE’s 2025 Childcare Experiences Survey Findings for factors influencing respondents decision to use formal childcare chart below; you can see that there’s a strong percentage of parents across the UK who, next to working, make decisions on their childcare option based on social development, emotional development and physical development and interests.
The Convenience-First Parent
The Department of Education’s 2025 Childcare Experiences Survey found that: When the offer of 30 hours funded childcare became available from September 2025, 44% of respondents intended to increase their number of childcare hours.
Indicating a huge increase in the rise of convenience based wraparound or childcare provision. And 63% of those respondents who reported an intention to change the number of hours their child spends in childcare in the future said they will do so to work more hours.
Now picture a different parent, a dad who works full-time in an office twenty minutes from home. School finishes at 3:15pm. He needs to be in a meeting until 5:30pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. He is not browsing for the perfect programme. He is searching for something that works.
Location is everything. Not vaguely near — actually near. Walking distance from the school gate, or on the direct route home. He will filter by proximity first and ask almost no other question until that box is ticked. Quality matters, safety matters enormously, but they only come into the decision once the logistics stack up. A brilliant programme fifteen minutes in the wrong direction might as well not exist.
This is the Convenience-First Parent, and with the government's expanded wraparound care offer pushing more working families into formal childcare, he represents a significant and growing share of the market. He doesn't browse. He filters fast, skims for what he needs (session times, availability, price), and books. The whole process might take eight minutes if everything is clear. Friction at any point will lose him.
What he needs from a listing is ruthless clarity. Exact location, not just a neighbourhood. Session times prominent. A live or near-live sense of availability, nothing is more frustrating than completing a booking flow only to find the session is full. He's less interested in narrative and more interested in whether you've anticipated his practical questions and answered them before he has to ask.
Speed of information is a form of trust for this parent. If your listing makes him hunt for basic details, you've already planted doubt.
The Word-of-Mouth Parent
The third parent doesn't start on a marketplace at all.
She's a mum who mentioned at pickup on Wednesday that she was struggling to find decent after-school care. Another parent, someone she trusts, whose judgement on these things she values said: "Oh, we used Elmfield Sports Academy last term. Really good. Look them up." By Thursday morning she's searched the name, found a listing, and is trying to book.
This is the Word-of-Mouth Parent, and she's operating on a completely different logic to the other two. She didn't compare options. She didn't read the description the way the Interest-Driven Parent did. She arrived pre-sold, someone she respects has already done that work for her. What she needs now is for the booking process to simply not let her down.
This sounds simple but it's easy to underestimate. The moment between a trusted recommendation and a completed booking is fragile. If the listing is hard to find, if the path has too many steps, if she has to create an account before she can even see availability, doubt creeps in. She might close the tab. She might go back to her friend and ask "did you have trouble booking?" By which point the momentum is gone.
The Word-of-Mouth Parent is the clearest argument for why the booking experience matters as much as the marketing. She doesn't need to be convinced of your quality, she needs the mechanism between "I want to book" and "I've booked" to be invisible. Under three minutes. No unnecessary steps. The personal recommendation is the strongest conversion signal in childcare; your job is simply not to waste it.
Curious how the Enrolmy Marketplace presents your programmes to each of these parents? Explore the marketplace →
What this means for your programme and your marketplace presence
Most childcare operators will have all three types of parent in their community. These aren't exclusive segments, they're overlapping patterns, and the same parent can shift between them depending on the booking they're making.
But understanding the three archetypes helps you make sharper decisions about where to put your effort.
For the Interest-Driven Parent, your programme description is doing the heaviest lifting. Be specific about what children will actually do, what they'll leave knowing, and who the programme is genuinely designed for. Don't aim to appeal to everyone, the parent who's researching carefully will reward the provider who has clearly thought about their audience.
For the Convenience-First Parent, remove friction everywhere. Location data, session times, and clear availability should be prominent and accurate. If a parent has to email to find out whether Tuesday has space, you've already lost ground. Think of the booking path as a sequence of questions, answer each one before it's asked.
For the Word-of-Mouth Parent, the booking mechanism itself is the priority. She arrives ready to commit. Your job is to honour that readiness by making the completion of a booking as frictionless as possible. Every unnecessary step in that process carries a risk of losing a booking that was effectively already won.
Across more than 12 million sessions on the Enrolmy platform, the kids activity providers who grow consistently are the ones who've stopped trying to appeal to parents in the abstract and started building their programmes and listings around how parents actually make decisions. It's a small shift in perspective. The outcomes are not small at all.
If you'd like to talk through how Enrolmy can help you reach more of the right parents, our UK team would love to hear from you →