No one knew what was going on behind closed doors

It was a place where parents trusted staff with the lives of their precious children. To keep them safe, look after them and to care for them.

But on May 9, 2022, in the leafy suburb of Cheadle Hulme, the Tiny Toes nursery, featuring portraits of joyous smiling tots on the outside, became the scene of unthinkable tragedy.

Parents who paid hundreds of pounds a week in fees now know that the nursery's cheerful image was a 'front'. In reality, this was a place where a number of babies had been threatened, manhandled and placed at risk.

The first sign that something was deeply amiss came in an afternoon phone call. John Meehan was on the school run when he was told the worst possible news. He was told his baby daughter, Genevieve, had been found unresponsive and blue - and that an ambulance was on its way to the nursery.

READ MORE "It could've been our son who died... I feel guilty for feeling lucky it wasn't"

Now, almost two-and-a-half years later, the full story of what went on at Tiny Toes can be told. Following a series of court hearings, with the most recent concluding this week, two workers - a nursery nurse and the centre's former deputy manager - are serving time behind bars for their treatment of the innocent babies who depended on them.

But those sentences won't bring back nine-month-old Genevieve Zofia Meehan, who died from asphyxia and 'pathophysiological stress' caused by deputy manager Kate Roughley, who was jailed in May. And they don't erase the trauma endured by her parents, or the parents of the four other children subjected to 'rough and aggressive' treatment and placed in 'dangerous' sleeping positions by nursery nurse Rebecca Gregory, who was jailed this week.

The four children who survived the neglect