Care requirements settings allow you to manage staff-to-child ratios and other care rules in one central place. These settings replace the need to manage ratios at the room level and give you more flexibility in how care requirements are applied across your setting.
What are Care Requirements?
Care requirements are rules that define and guide compliance between children and staff in your setting.
You can set up rules for specific age groups, which is great for rooms with mixed-age children, as the compliance rules dynamically adapt. You can also set up custom care groups that apply rules to one or more rooms, regardless of the age of the children attending.
Instead of being set individually in each room, configure your rules centrally and apply them across all your rooms, with a bird's eye overview of what care requirements are guiding compliance where.
How Care Requirements Work
All care rules are managed from the Care requirements page in your Settings. From here, you can create and manage two types of groups: Age groups and Custom groups.
Age groups
Age groups define the unique age ranges of your children and the care rules, such as staff ratios, that apply to each.
Staff ratio calculations automatically adapt based on the number of children expected or attending in a room, always fulfilling the requirements of the youngest children first.
Custom groups
Custom groups let you apply specific care rules across one or more rooms, overwriting any age group rules for children in those rooms.
You can also define staff ratios for each group, or set a group up with no ratio at all.
If a room has not been added to a custom group, Famly will apply the age group rules based on the children expected or attending that room.
Flexible Setup Options
You can structure your care rules in a few different ways depending on how your setting operates:
Use Age groups for precise, dynamic compliance in mixed-age rooms
Use Custom groups for a classroom or group year setup (for example, all children born in a specific year, regardless of their exact age on the day) or for rooms with consistent, unique compliance needs
Combine both to support different rooms and scenarios, including staff-only rooms with no ratio
This flexibility allows you to support a wide range of operational and compliance needs.
Age Groups and Fallback Rules
Age groups define default staff ratios based on children's ages. They are used when:
You want ratios to be based purely on children's age, calculated down to the day
You want the system to automatically recalculate staff-to-child ratio needs based on the specific mix of children in a room, always solving for the youngest age group first
A room does not have a custom care group assigned
This fallback ensures ratios are always applied, even if no custom setup is in place.
To add an age group:
Click + Add in the Age groups section. If you have already added age groups, click Edit to make changes
For each age group, define the age range in months (from, and up to and including, for example, 0 to 23 months)
Add the maximum number of children allowed per staff member for each age group (required)
Add the maximum capacity per age group for the site (optional)
To schedule an update to an age group for a future date, click Schedule, choose the new version start date, and make the required changes.
Custom Care Groups
Custom care groups let you apply specific care rules across multiple rooms, overwriting any age group rules that would otherwise apply. With custom care groups, you can:
Configure care rules for multiple rooms together
Set room-specific staff ratios that override age group defaults
Schedule version changes and set start dates in the past or future
This makes it much easier to manage compliance settings across your nursery without needing to update each room individually.
To add a custom care group:
Click + Add in the Custom groups section
Give your custom care group a name and assign the relevant rooms
Choose whether to schedule this rule and select a start date
Add a staff-to-child ratio for the group (optional)
Important Notes
There are a few things to be aware of if your setting previously had ratios configured at the room level:
Rooms that had ratios set individually have been migrated to Custom care groups
If multiple rooms shared the same staff ratio, they were joined into a single custom care group
A ratio set from a custom care group overwrites age group ratios, just as room-level ratios did before
If any of these custom care groups are not needed, you can delete them by clicking Edit, then selecting the ... menu and choosing Delete