Bracken Place Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Positive improvements have been made since the last inspection to ensure the registration requirements are being met. The key-person approach is securely embedded. Staff work hard to foster good relationships with all children to help them settle swiftly. Consequently, children are happy and settled and confidently seek out staff for reassurance and support when needed. Staff have a robust understanding of the unique needs of each child. This allows staff to plan educational programmes that continuously build on children's existing knowledge and skills. There is a particular emphasis on ensuring that children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) have their needs met well.

Staff expose children to rich and varied opportunities to develop their communication skills and extend their growing vocabulary. For example, very young children show curiosity in selecting props from a song bag to join in group singing. Furthermore, older children delight in engaging in ice play where staff model new words and their explanations, such as 'freezing', 'melting' and 'droplets'. This helps children make connections between their play as they learn new words and their meanings.

Staff plan for challenging physical activities. This supports children to develop skills such as balance, spatial awareness and dexterity so they can move their whole bodies in a variety of ways. Staff are positive role models to children. They help children to understand their growing emotions and promote consistent behavioural expectations as they learn right from wrong. This contributes to children's positive behaviours within their play, interactions and learning.

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

• Leaders continuously reflect on their early years offer to identify how they put steps in place to drive continuous improvement. This contributes towards ensuring children receive good quality early years care and education.
• Staff recognise the importance of planning activities and play experiences that incorporate children's interests as well as their individual stages of development. Since the last inspection, leaders and staff have worked together to design a bespoke curriculum. Although this is in place, leaders recognise it is yet to be fully embedded. Despite these early stages of implementation, children demonstrate they are making good progress across all areas of learning.
• Overall, staff plan and provide a variety of purposeful outdoor play opportunities. However, at times, the youngest children's outdoor experiences are not as well considered as they could be. Nevertheless, staff ensure that children have daily access to the outside provision.
• Staff provide opportunities for children to play together in mixed age groups.
• This allows children to develop social skills, including empathy. Staff support children to learn about their own needs as well as the needs of others. For instance, older children are eager to help younger children with self-help skills such as washing hands. They help them to turn the taps on and give them gentle reminders not to forget the soap. Staff provide positive praise to reinforce children's kindness as they develop good relationships with their friends.
• Leaders and staff work collaboratively with parents and a wide range of external professionals. This enables them to seek advice and guidance to implement effective strategies to support individual children, including those with SEND, to make the progress they are capable of.
• Risk assessments are used effectively to ensure children can play and explore in a safe environment. During play experiences, staff gently remind children of rules and boundaries, explaining why they have asked them not to do something. This supports children's growing understanding of how to keep themselves safe. In addition, leaders consider staff deployment arrangements to ensure children are well supervised at all times.
• Staff provide children with high-quality interactions and recognise the importance of developing children's communication and language skills. They provide purposeful opportunities to promote language through a variety of ways. For example, staff regularly share stories, rhymes and songs with children. In addition, staff provide children with time to share their own thoughts and ideas. This gives children time to process new information and extend their own discussions as they practise conversational skills. This supports children to become confident communicators.
• Leaders and staff work hard to generate good partnership working between families and the provision. They provide feedback to parents about the progress of their children's learning and development. Furthermore, they offer a variety of additional information, advice and guidance to support families about a range of topics, including safer sleeping and potty training.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• continue to build on the curriculum offer to ensure it is fully embedded and precisely meets the needs of all children
• strengthen outdoor experiences to ensure these offer purposeful and well-planned learning opportunities to support the youngest children.