Every so often, something happens in the childcare world that makes you sit up, and this is one of those moments. Norland College has been granted university status.
From 7th September 2026, the Bath institution will officially become Norland University of Early Childhood, which makes it the world’s first university devoted entirely to early childhood education.
That’s a genuine first, and it’s a big deal for anyone who has ever argued that looking after young children is a proper profession requiring proper training.
We work in this world every day at Superstar Nannies, and recognition like this doesn’t come along often. So we wanted to mark it.
More Than 130 Years In The Making
Norland opened its doors back in 1892, founded on a simple yet rather radical idea for the time: that childcare deserved to be treated as a serious, skilled and respected profession. That idea never went away, and this announcement is really the culmination of well over a century of sticking to it.
The build-up has been steady. Norland has held degree-awarding powers since 2019, and those powers were made indefinite in 2025, a significant moment in its own right.
It has also picked up three Gold ratings in a row in the national Teaching Excellence Framework, the highest rating available, putting it in the top 12% of providers in the country. Its most recent assessment in 2023 came back Gold across every single aspect, which is impressive for any institution and particularly so for one this specialised.
There’s more. Six WhatUni Student Choice Awards, four consecutive years as the UK’s Specialist Institution of the Year in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, and a Highly Commended at the Times Higher Education Awards in 2025. That’s not a fluke. That’s a pattern. Norland Nannies are known for the best in the industry!
So What Does University Status Actually Change?
It’s a fair question because, on the surface, it might look like just a name change. In practice, it’s rather more than that.
University status is an independent, formal confirmation that what’s being taught meets the highest standards of academic and professional rigour in British higher education. For an institution focused entirely on early childhood, that’s a meaningful stamp.
There’s also something genuinely exciting alongside it. Norland is now home to the world’s first specialist research centre and journal dedicated to home-based early childhood education and care.
That might sound niche, but it matters. Care research that happens in family homes has always lagged behind research into nurseries and schools, so having a dedicated centre gives everyone working in this space a proper evidence base to draw on.
Why This Is Good News For All Of Us
Professional childcare has always sat in a slightly odd spot. Families hand over their children at the most formative stage of their lives, yet from the outside, the work is often treated as something informal or unskilled.
Anyone who has actually done it knows better. Having a university dedicated to it challenges that perception in the most public way possible.
It lifts expectations, too. When one institution is independently assessed as world-class, it shifts how families think about qualifications, how training providers design their courses, and how practitioners think about their own careers.
That’s a win for everyone in the early years, whichever route they trained through.
What Really Makes The Difference
If there’s one thing this news underlines, it’s the value of proper preparation. The best early years professionals pair real academic grounding in child psychology and development with plenty of hands-on experience in family homes.
They understand routine, attachment, language development and behaviour, and, just as importantly, they know how to apply all of that in the middle of a chaotic Tuesday morning.
Then there are the things no qualification can quite capture. Discretion, warmth, patience, curiosity and the knack of bringing a bit of calm to a household. Those are what families remember years later, long after they’ve forgotten what was on the CV.
Recognition like Norland’s simply confirms what those families already knew: this work deserves to be taken seriously.
Congratulations From All Of Us
We’d like to say a huge congratulations to everyone at Norland. More than 130 years of work have gone into this, and it’s thoroughly deserved.
As for us, we spend our days matching families with exceptional, highly qualified childcare professionals across London, the UK, the Middle East, Europe, the United States and further afield.
Every family wants something a little different, and our job is to work out what that is and find someone whose training, character and values genuinely suit their home.
If you’re starting to think about childcare for your own family, we’d love to hear from you.
