The Lounge Community
The conversation
the sector needed.
Finally.
Nursery practitioners across the UK — talking honestly, supporting each other, and building something the profession has never had before.
Join the Waitlist 🌿You look after the children.
The Lounge is here to look after you.
Monthly direct debit · Cancel anytime · Your space to talk.
Nursery practitioners care for millions of children every day.
Yet they often carry the profession alone.
The Lounge changes that.
Every space inside The Lounge was designed around how practitioners actually live and work — not how institutions think they do.
Every space has a purpose. The first is open to everyone. Everything else unlocks with membership.
One membership. Three pillars. Built by practitioners who lived every single one of these gaps.
Developed by senior nursery practitioners — for nurseries. Not a replacement for your professional knowledge. A tool that removes the blank page.
The place you belong and the infrastructure that has your back. Whether you need a peer who understands your day or practical help with sick pay and rights — this pillar is the foundation.
The place you come to fill back up. Early Years is one of the most emotionally demanding careers there is. This pillar exists so you don't have to carry it alone.
The place that treats you as the skilled professional you are. From the toolkit that saves hours of paperwork to the conversations that give the sector a voice.
Ruvini Dias Bandaranayake started her first business at fifteen — a heat and eat meals range in Sri Lanka, pioneering a concept that didn’t yet exist there. She went on to lead some of Sri Lanka’s most significant national institutions: CEO of Airport and Aviation Services Sri Lanka, Managing Director of the Colombo Oil Bank, and Managing Director of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau — Head of Tourism for the whole country.
Alongside that career, she has been a qualified Montessori practitioner for over two decades — working in Early Years settings in the United States, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom. She has been on the floor of nurseries, on her feet for eight-hour shifts, writing Tapestry observations, catching every illness going. She has watched brilliant colleagues burn out and leave. She has felt the isolation, the invisibility, the absence of any structure that truly had practitioners’ backs.
She built The Lounge because she was the practitioner it is designed for. And because nothing like it existed.
"The Lounge is also built in memory of my son, Revan — who passed away on February 10th 2025. A portion of everything we earn will go towards the Revan Fernando Foundation, supporting young people facing cancer in Sri Lanka. Every membership is part of that story."
Both tiers include full access to everything The Lounge offers. Monthly direct debit — cancel anytime.
The Early Years workforce enables the entire working economy. When that workforce cracks, the consequences reach far beyond the nursery door.
Support the practitioner. Protect the childcare place.
Strengthen the workforce that makes everything else possible.
The Lounge sits at the start of that chain.
Monthly direct debit. Full access. Cancel anytime.
Founding rate: £7/month — first 100 only.
Founding £7/month · Regular £9.99/month · Direct debit · Your space to talk.
This venture is created in loving memory of
Revan Fernando Dias Bandaranayake
Revan was an exceptionally bright young man whose curiosity and talent drew him naturally toward computers and technology. While preparing to begin his studies at the University of Buckingham, he impressed the Dean so profoundly that he was offered a place immediately. His intelligence, warmth and extraordinary promise remain the inspiration behind this work.
In many ways, building this platform is something Revan would have loved — technology used not only to connect people, but to create real help in the world. I often think he would smile at the idea that his mother is now building a platform that uses technology to help others.