Welcome to Maplelu Training Academy
Personal tailored courses to fit your setting
About Us
Hi my name is Lesley, mum to 6 fur babies and 3 human children.
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I have been a dog groomer now for 10 years, working with some fantastic salons and then going on to set up and own my own Dog Grooming Salon.
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Before I was a Dog Groomer I worked as a tutor / assessor / IQA in the childcare sector. Ive worked in colleges, local council and private sector.
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In 2019 a salon that I was working for was having trouble with their current training provider. I spoke to the manager in-depth about what worked and what didn't work with them delivering the qualification and also the support given to their students.
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I took this information along with my previous experience as an assessor and created a course that would allow us to deliver both the AIM Level 3 Certificate in Dog Grooming and also Level 3 Diploma in Dog Grooming.
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I now feel after 4 years of listening to feedback and making tweaks, we were in the position to offer our course to other salons supporting them to become Academy's.
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One of my main prioritises is that we contactable at all time's to support our centres.
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We are very aware we are not working with teachers / tutors and for this reason we support our tutors on how to deliver the course. We also do 100% of the paperwork for you, which leaves you to do what you do best.
Hi, I’m Nicola and I am the other half to Maplelu Training Academy alongside Lesley.
I have two amazing human children, Ben who is 20 and Annabel who is 12. We have our small zoo to keep us busy including Wilson the Wonder Dog who is my 3rd child!
Dog grooming wasn’t always my first choice of careers and despite always having a love for animals of all shapes and sizes, I actually come from a background in education. Having spent time working in schools and then running two pre-schools it was somewhat of an accident that I found dog grooming and fell in love with it, I believe in things happen for a reason and I think it found me just when I needed it!
Just before Christmas 2019, Lesley was left in a position at her salon where she had an appointment book full of clients and was suddenly left alone to try and be super woman on top of running a busy household. I offered to step in and help, not thinking I would like or be in the least bit useful but well, I loved it and am still loving it to this day! I decided to stay and qualify as a dog groomer over the following months.
When Lesley mentioned opening the academy I was totally on board as I knew that although at the time, I was relatively new to the grooming world in comparison to her, I could bring my wealth of knowledge in the teaching and education sector to this side of the business. Having also been a lead SEN practitioner and undertaken various training throughout my career, I am able to support students who have additional needs to ensure they can access and achieve the qualifications on a level with more able peers.
We have worked really hard over the past few years to gain as much knowledge and experience as we can to build up the academy to what it is today. We now feel like we have built a good solid programme to allow other grooming salons to follow our lead and be able to offer courses to students and turn out good, confident groomers within their setting.
We take care of all the paperwork including all the marking. We work alongside each setting to produce personalised training manuals and portfolios. Being available to you when you need us is important as we want to provide that personal experience to help you feel confident when training your students. We know how daunting it can be when you first start up and will be with you every step of the way!