Calm before clever
- Priority-led screens: what needs attention before general activity
- No gamification, streaks, rankings or performance badges for children
- Restrained visual design that stays readable in a busy room
About Nurtalo
Calm software for people responsible for children
Nurtalo is a UK-first nursery operating system built around safety, accessibility and honest software that early years teams can trust. It is designed for settings in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
How we work
- Small, reviewed slices. Capabilities ship as complete vertical slices with their own tests, rather than as half-finished screens that look done.
- Boundaries before switches. External integrations are built as reviewed, disabled-by-default boundaries and only enabled when they are genuinely complete.
- Plain language. If something is not built yet, the product and this website say so.
The team
Written next to the people who have to use it
We spend our time in staff rooms and offices after the doors close, watching how a day is actually reconstructed from paper, a group chat and someone's memory. That is where every screen in Nurtalo starts.
How we work
The rules we hold ourselves to
Not adoption figures from other people's settings. These are working practices you can hold us to during a trial.
- How capability ships
- Small slices
- Each area ships complete with its own tests rather than as a screen that looks finished.
- How integrations start
- Off by default
- Payments, e-mail, push, scanning and export are reviewed boundaries that stay switched off until they are genuinely complete.
- On anything enabled
- Named owner
- Nothing external is turned on without a person who owns it and a rehearsed way to turn it off.
- On this website
- Plain language
- If something is planned rather than built, the product and these pages say planned.
Principles
What the product is built to be
The child is a person, not a metric
- Records describe what happened, not a score
- No child league tables of any kind
- Sensitive information stays with the people who need it
Evidence over reassurance
- History is written as it happens rather than reconstructed
- Receipts state audience, time and server state
- Unknown is shown as unknown
Recovery over blame
- Your input survives a recoverable error
- Corrections are supported as first-class actions
- Confirmations are reserved for material or safety-critical steps
Where we are
Pre-launch, and honest about it
Nurtalo is in active development ahead of launch. We would rather tell you plainly what exists today, what is being reviewed, and what is still to come, than imply a finished service.
Nurtalo Web, including the HQ workspace for multi-site groups, is the current build, alongside three Nurtalo apps installed straight from Nurtalo: Nurtalo Parent for families, Nurtalo Staff for practitioners and Nurtalo Kiosk for the doorway tablet.
Several external integrations — online payments and mandates, e-mail and device push delivery, document virus scanning and data-export brokering — exist as reviewed boundaries that are switched off by default. That is a deliberate choice: the safe version of an integration is one that cannot half-work.
Accessibility
Built to be usable by everyone on the team
Accessible for the people actually using it
- WCAG 2.2 AA treated as the working minimum, checked as we build
- Full keyboard operation with a clearly visible focus indicator
- Minimum 44 x 44 pixel targets on every product action
- Status never communicated by colour alone
- Readable at 200% text size, and respects reduced-motion preferences
Localisation from the first build
- Every string is localisable rather than concatenated together
- Dates, times, numbers and currency use en-GB formatting
- No layout that assumes a single reading direction
- Early years terminology used as UK settings actually use it
Want to talk to the people building it?
Early conversations are with the team doing the work, not a call centre. Tell us about your provision and we will be specific.