Nothing but Sunshine - Anonymous employee Sunshine Support Employee Review

Flexible working hours, supportive team mates where we were all on a mission to support children and young people with special educational needs. As a new employee within with Sunshine Support it felt really good because all my boxes were ticked about what I needed from a job, I felt appreciated and valued especially because I was working for what I was told was a high profile company - “the fastest growing SEND company in the UK”. It felt too good to be true.

It was too good to be true. I experienced the marketing as misleading and that customers were charged a lot of money for services where some staff had no professional qualifications. I was publicly ‘sold’ to customers as “brilliant”, my workload increased until I was swamped with cases and I felt undermined and belittled when I couldn’t cope.

I am a medium-term employee at Sunshine Support. I have not been asked to write this review. I really enjoy working here, since I started, the whole team has evolved and grown, as should be expected with any small business growing over time. As a result, I have been able to contribute my ideas to systems and processes to make them run more smoothly. I've found I'm listened to by both middle and upper management, who seem to know when I just need to rant, or if I need them to fix something. My colleagues are hard-working supportive and highly knowledgable within all teams at Sunshine Support. They treat each other, external professionals and their clients with absolute respect at all times, even when at times things can be challenging and demands can be high. I'm really well supported to talk openly about when things are hard, as in any emotive job, they can be, I never feel under pressure to work when I am not well, consequently I don't feel burnt out. We all step in and help each other.

It is a shame to hear that some past employees are unhappy, it has made me worry about how external people view the company I really enjoy working for. As a current employee I feel some of the statements made on other reviews are highly specific to them and are not reflective of my experience, but are written in a way that appears to speaks for me and my current colleagues as though their experiences are the norm that others also experience. It is not the norm for me so I have found this quite offensive to read. There are also more negative reviews by ex-employees than there are actual ex-employees. I feel quite sorry for this minority of people who appear to want to exploit the shortcomings of this website to post multiple unverified reviews as the management they are attacking aren't the ones they're upsetting, it's the colleagues that some reviews say are the best element of the company. I have never left a review on anything before but I feel so strongly about this that I have written it.