Apples & Pears Private Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children enter the nursery happily and settle well. Staff support children to develop independence and help them to learn how to work with others. They encourage older children to support younger children and those new to their room. This helps to create a welcoming environment. Easily accessible outdoor spaces enable children to choose whether to play and learn indoors or outdoors.

Children enjoy a range of songs, rhymes and stories throughout the day, which helps them to develop good language and literacy skills. Generally, staff ensure that conversations are meaningful, which helps children to develop their spoken language. Children practise taking turns, and they listen when others are speaking during group times. Children are keen to interact with visitors, which demonstrates their confidence and self-esteem. They are well prepared emotionally, demonstrating essential skills to move up from the baby room, through each age group in the nursery and on to school. The nursery's curriculum is well structured. Staff follow plans that clearly identify the knowledge children will learn and in what order. They check regularly what children know, understand and can do. They use this information well to decide what children need to learn next. Children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and those in receipt of additional funding, make good progress.

What does the early years setting do well and what does it need to do better?

• Leaders reflect on the quality of practice. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, in response to the difficulty of recruiting experienced staff, they have appointed additional management staff. Their extended management team coaches and mentors newly appointed staff effectively. Managers have a clear view of the nursery's strengths and are working through plans to build further on their good practice.
• Staff induction is thorough and includes essential training, such as in paediatric first aid and safeguarding. There is a clear system of ongoing supervision in place, including peer-to-peer observations, which is helping the management team to prioritise further training for staff.
• Children develop a keen interest in reading. They choose to look at books and listen to many stories read well by staff. Story time is an enjoyable experience. During the inspection, children played imaginatively with props purposefully made by staff while listening to a well-known book 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea'.
• Children are beginning to learn about equality, diversity and inclusion through books, planned activities and experiences. Parents share their knowledge, skills and talents with the children. For example, recently, the mother of one child talked to children about her job as a pilot. Experiences such as this provide children with positive messages about gender. However, sometimes, children receive mixed messages about equality and gender when staff do not think carefully enough about the words they use in general conversations with children.
• Partnership with parents is good. Parents exchange useful information about their children's welfare and learning with staff as they collect them, through electronic systems and during planned meetings. Staff work closely with parents and professionals from other agencies to identify children with SEND early. They adapt the provision well to meet children's specific needs.
• Children behave well. They follow courteous rules, such as waiting for everyone to be served before starting to eat their food. They talk about the needs of others while raising money for national and local charities.
• Children's physical health is well promoted in a range of ways. Children move body parts as they dance while listening to music. Outdoors, children run and show increasing balance as they ride on wheeled vehicles. They talk about the care of teeth during activities, such as brushing marks off pictures of laminated teeth.
• Information about children's care needs, dietary requirements, preferences and allergies are obtained from parents before children start and kept under review. Staff follow clear procedures to ensure that children's care and dietary needs are met.
• A range of opportunities to develop early writing skills are sequenced well as children move from the baby room and through each age group. Children run fingers through a range of sensory materials, including flour and oats; they use chalk on easily accessible low-level boards, and they draw with crayons and felt pens on paper.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• embed and build on the link between observation of practice and the support, coaching and training provided to improve staff's knowledge and skills
• deepen staff's understanding of how to carefully construct dialogue to avoid gender stereotyping, promote equality and prepare children for life in modern Britain.