Most nurseries have an emergency plan and an emergency binder. The real test is whether every member of the team can act on that plan calmly and quickly when it matters. In the second session of illumine's emergency preparedness series for nurseries in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), early years leader Lara Hudson joined Purva Goyal, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of illumine, to look at how to move from a plan on paper to a team that knows what to do. This is the written recap. The full recording is at the top of this page.

Speakers

Lara Hudson, Early Years Leader and Education Strategist
Purva Goyal, Co-Founder and CPO, illumine

Best for

Nursery owners, managers and the staff who lead drills, first aid and parent communication

Session length

53 minutes

In this recap

Training that sticks, priorities for the new year, making an emergency call, evacuation scenarios, safe zones, room sweeps, debriefs, accountability and the questions raised live

Key takeaways

A plan only works if the whole team understands it. Preparedness is a team effort, not one confident person.
Train in short, interactive sessions spread across the year, not one long briefing that overwhelms staff.
Make sure every staff member knows the nursery's address and how to give emergency services the right information.
Practice more than one evacuation route, and rehearse with staff before involving children.
Plan for the hard scenarios: blocked exits, children with mobility needs and evacuations during nap time.
Debrief after every drill: celebrate what went well, then fix what slowed you down.
Name individuals for each responsibility. If a whole team is responsible, nobody is.

Why training around your plan matters

The first session in the series covered how to write an emergency plan. This one was about living it every day. Lara's starting point was that staff training should be as hands-on as children's learning. Scenario-based, interactive practice is what makes the right response come to mind under stress, in a way a lecture on compliance does not.

Emergency plans used to come out mainly when a regulator required it or bad weather forced a change of routine. Lara said preparedness now matters day to day, particularly for nurseries in the region given recent events. A well-practiced plan gives owners and managers less uncertainty, shows they take their responsibilities seriously and leads to a calm response.

If we do have to use them, we need to get it right the first time.

In an opening poll, attendees rated their teams as very prepared, somewhat prepared or neutral in roughly equal shares. A second poll asked where the biggest gap lies. The options were staff confidence, communication, evacuation planning, drill consistency, operational visibility and parent communication, and staff confidence came out on top.

Building staff confidence

Lara stressed that clear responsibilities in a document are not enough. They need to be talked through in staff meetings so everyone shares the same understanding. Teams also need to practice coordinating under pressure, with the right people in the right places and clear expectations for each type of emergency. Everyone shares accountability for every child and every adult on site.

Keep it bite-sized
Spread training across several team meetings rather than covering everything at once. Overwhelmed staff do not take in what matters.
Train by role
Bring together people with the same responsibilities so each group shares one clear expectation.
Refresh regularly
Revisit the plan every three to six months in staff meetings, and build it into induction for new team members.
Ask how staff feel
Run a quick anonymous poll at the start of a staff meeting to find where people want more training.

Six priorities for the new year

Lara shared what she would focus on with a new or returning team in September:

Making an emergency call
It is far harder under stress than people assume. Ask your teachers whether they know the nursery's physical address.
Evacuation routes
Plan A, plan B and plan C from every room, because an emergency does not always happen in the same place.
Room sweeps
A consistent way to check every area, including toilets and play equipment, and to confirm a space is clear.
Register checks
Taking the register outside, then passing that information to the wider team correctly.
Moving to a safe zone
Moving calmly, keeping children occupied once there and having what you need.
Grab bag checks
Checking contents and expiry dates, and whether the bag still suits the ages of the children in your care.

Making an emergency call

Lara suggested starting a staff meeting with a quick quiz on emergency numbers. In the UAE, 999 is the police, 998 is the ambulance, 997 is the fire department (civil defense) and 996 is the coast guard in Abu Dhabi (in other emirates, marine emergencies go to 999). Adding your regulator's emergency line is a useful extra test.

She recommends a poster beside every telephone, because reading the details is much easier than recalling them in a crisis. Her mnemonic is LINE:

L: Location
Your full address, your Makani number if you are in Dubai, and your Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates. That gives emergency services three ways to find you.
I: Incident
What is happening, such as a fire, an accident or someone taken ill. Say that you are calling from a nursery, so they know many young children are on site.
N: Number of people
How many children and adults are involved, evacuated, injured or unaccounted for, so the right number of vehicles is sent.
E: Emergency type
Be specific, for example a child who is not breathing or an adult receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), so the right response arrives.

Practicing evacuation

Lara does not believe in training one route. In her drills, a traffic cone decorated with paper flames is moved around the building, so the fire is in the staff room one time and a classroom doorway the next. Staff have to think on their feet about which exit to use. She recommends practicing with staff first, ideally during induction, and only then introducing new routes to the children.

Scenario cards help, because real emergencies rarely fit a neat box. Lara suggested talking each one through as a team:

Where the fire is. How does the response change for a fire in the kitchen compared with a classroom or a shared area?
Smoke in the corridor. Stay low, cover mouths if possible and get out by the quickest safe route.
A blocked exit. This is when plan B and plan C routes matter.
A child with mobility needs. Use individual evacuation plans, and discuss temporary needs too, such as a child returning from the summer with a broken leg.
Evacuating at nap time. Sleepy, unsettled children slow everything down. Agree priorities and how to use evacuation cots, and run it with staff first.

Purva noted how easily these scenarios get missed in a typical training plan. Lara said early years teams are already flexible and responsive, so the next step is to push them beyond the basics.

Safe zones

Having safe zones clearly marked and in suitable places is only the start. Lara said staff also need to know where nearby emergency equipment is kept, how to keep children calm and engaged once there (a mini disco is one idea), and exactly who goes to which zone, including from the gym or from outdoors.

Practicing under pressure

The hardest moment is when an alarm sounds and children are spread across the room. Each class team needs an agreed way to gather children into a line, whether a phrase, a signal or a whistle, and needs to have practiced it.

Then comes the room sweep. Lara said civil defense teams will run drills with nurseries, asking staff to hide as casualties and then searching for them. If that is not possible, use a team training day: ask a couple of staff members to hide the way a child would, and have everyone else sweep their allocated spaces. Start from the far corner and work toward the door, looking inside and behind equipment and checking bathrooms. Every setting will be slightly different depending on its layout.

Debrief every drill

After any drill, sit down as a team. Lara suggested four questions:

What went well?
→
What slowed us down?
→
What confused anyone?
→
What needs to improve?

Celebrate the wins first. A soft play area that was hard to sweep, or an evacuation you want to bring from seven minutes to five, shows where to focus next.

This should not sit only with the manager. Drawing on the whole team's knowledge builds shared accountability for the process.

The "what's missing?" grab bag game

At the start of a staff meeting, put out a grab bag with one or two items removed and ask the team what is missing. It tests what people know and often surfaces useful additions. Lara's examples included cash to buy water, spare batteries and a flashlight, which saves your phone battery. Contents should also match the children: diapers and wipes for infants, toilet paper for older children.

Making preparedness part of daily operations

Lara described the goal as lived preparedness: responses that are almost automatic, not dependent on memory. That rests on five things:

Clear coordination
Explain roles, responsibilities and expectations, and leave time for questions. This level of preparedness is new for many people.
Shared documentation
Make sure everyone has read the plan. Questions are a good sign that people are starting to understand it.
Operational visibility
Build preparedness into staff meetings, induction and a drill schedule each term.
Parent communication
Tell families how you keep their children safe and let them know when drills have taken place.
Named accountability
Assign each responsibility to a named person, such as the nurse for first aid.

For communication, Lara suggested one person who oversees all messages, perhaps the administrator. It should be someone confident who knows the nursery's communication system well. Pre-written messages for moves to a safe zone and for fire drills mean parents hear what happened from the nursery first, not from their child.

Consistency across branches

Groups with several nurseries often find some teams are much stronger than others. Lara suggested pairing stronger teams with those that need support, and bringing everyone together at the start of the year to set shared expectations before each branch works out the details for its own site.

How illumine supports emergency readiness

Purva showed two ways illumine helps teams act quickly:

Real-time attendance. Teachers or parents check children in and out, and leaders can see who is on site in every room, filter by room and download attendance reports on the web dashboard or mobile app. That makes register checks faster during an evacuation. See digital attendance.
Emergency documents on every phone. Leaders can upload emergency plans and training documents into folders that staff can open in the mobile app, which helps if the paper copy is not to hand. Explore nursery management software.

Lara added that the communications lead should know the system well enough to send updates to parents quickly. See how illumine supports teacher and parent communication.

Questions from the session

Where are nursery teams least prepared?

In the poll, staff confidence came out as the biggest gap. Lara said it can be hard to judge, because staff may be confident in one area and unsure in another. That is why she recommends regular, role-specific training and asking staff directly where they want more support.

What should you do if something in the plan still is not clear?

One attendee said the session cleared up points their previous training had not. Lara encouraged everyone to raise questions in their own setting, because if one person is unsure, others probably are too.

How can teams support children's well-being during unsettling events?

An attendee suggested training teachers and leaders on how to respond when children hear alarming sounds or ask questions, and involving parents too. Lara suggested a future session on how to train managers to run a session for parents. Purva added that this series was planned in response to feedback from nursery leaders in the UAE, and invited further topic ideas.

Resources mentioned

An emergency readiness checklist, emailed to attendees with the recording.
Scenario cards for team training.

What to do next

Put a LINE poster with your address, Makani number and GPS coordinates beside every telephone.
Run the emergency numbers quiz at your next staff meeting.
Map plan A, B and C evacuation routes from every room, and practice them with staff before children.
Talk through at least one hard scenario, such as nap time or a blocked exit, and agree the response.
Hold a room sweep role play on your next team training day.
Check every grab bag for missing or expired items.
Assign a named person to each responsibility in your plan.

For more on preparing nursery teams, read the recap of The Nursery Induction Toolkit 2026 or The WhatsApp Playbook for UAE Nurseries. To see how illumine supports nurseries, book a live demo.

Emergency Readiness for Nurseries in the UAE