

Louise Lloyd-Evans
Founder


Louise Lloyd-Evans
Founder
Child care qualifications
Louise is qualified to Level 6 Childcare and Education with Early Years Professional Status. She also has a BA (Hons) in History of Art and has Scuba Diving and Skydiving qualifications.
About me
I have three brilliant children. At 6, my eldest, now storming it at Uni, was an integral part of Young Friends at its conception. Those first few children adored her and her them.
My mission, together with my father (now sadly passed), was, in his word to create ‘the best nursery in the UK’. My other two children also spent their first years in Young Friends. We lived in the building, and they were literally breast fed in staff supervisions!
I’ve lived and breathed the place all that time, always fascinated by nature alongside child development and wellbeing. More recently, in tandem with a passion for this at home, I became intent on merging all of this with sustainability.
As Founder, I have now finally taken a step away from daily management – a difficult decision because I just love the Young Friends team, and only made possible because Emma and I happened upon each other. I was determined only to do this when the absolute right person came along. It’s been a sweeping learning curve for me in many areas like biodiversity etc, and my passion has increasingly become about creating little sustainable citizens and helping the team get excited by this. I want to help them to understand what natural sustainable learning truly means in practice and to child outcomes, and how to facilitate it whilst sticking to the EYFS. It’s an exciting journey we are all on, and far from over yet.
When I’m not building up the kindergarten, I love running, and going for country walks with my family and my beautiful Labrador. She has the perfect temperament for a nursery dog, and I often take her to kindergarten. The children adore her. I have always owned pets and been interested in animal therapy. We’ve started keeping (and rescuing) guinea pigs at the kindergarten too. They are hilarious, and I love to encourage the staff to spend lots of time with them with the children.
I also adore gardening and am soon to embark on my RHS gardening course. I learnt a lot about rewilding and in my last house (much to my children’s dismay) I turned the entire (small) garden into a haven for wildlife. Of course I also bring this to kindergarten– hence our gorgeous wild woodland garden.
I am passionate about sustainability inside the house too and have a cupboard dedicated to making my own cleaning and other products. It’s so rewarding.
Interior Design has always been a passion of mine and I love to create a feature wall. Colour plays a massive role in well-being and how we feel and I have tried to incorporate this into the kindergarten décor to establish a feeling of calm and well-being.
I also love photography, which I also manage to use when creating social media posts and to promote a healthy partnership with our families and wider community.
I love coming to work because I am incredibly proud of the environment and team I have created. I believe what Young Friends Kindergarten, and Young Friends Tribe is doing is incredibly important, and our talented and caring team do too. It’s exciting to be making a difference to these children’s lives and, though they don’t know it yet, many of them will grow up to do important things with regards to sustainability because it will be a part of them – they will just do it naturally. That makes me very proud indeed.