Busy Bees Day Nursery at Bristol, Portishead

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Leaders welcome children and parents on arrival, so children arrive happy and are confident in the setting. Staff provide an exciting environment, which provokes children's curiosity and engages them in activities straight away. For example, children are eager to plant seeds in pots they have previously made. They understand what the seeds need to grow and discuss what the different seeds will look like. Children use mathematical language and share the resources with their friends.

The provider has devised an ambitious curriculum, focusing on embedding children's prime areas of development and promoting their positive attitudes to learning. Overall, staff implement this successfully, providing consistently good-quality teaching. Children have good opportunities for outdoor learning, where they extend their physical development and awareness of the importance of exercise.

Children behave well and understand the adults' expectations. From babies, children develop strong bonds with their key person, ensuring they feel emotionally secure. This underpins their ability to learn and develop successfully. Staff get to know the children well, making effective use of children's interests to motivate their learning. They build on what children can already do, enabling them to gain the knowledge and skills they need, ready for school.

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

• Staff support children's independence successfully throughout the nursery. This was a recommendation at their last inspection. For babies, they have hygiene stations where they can access tissues. Toddlers learn to serve themselves breakfast and pour drinks, ensuring that by pre-school children manage as much as they can for themselves.
• Staff provide good opportunities for children to engage in social interactions, helping them to understand and manage their emotions appropriately. Staff are gentle with babies, provide good role models and help young children to learn to share. Older children value other people's differences, while gaining a positive awareness of their own uniqueness. Children who speak English as an additional language have good opportunities to hear and use their first language, as well as use resources that represent their backgrounds.
• Staff provide good support for children to develop their language and communication skills. They respond well to babies' babbling and provide narratives for their play. They use books, songs and rhymes, for children to remember phrases and learn new vocabulary. Staff give children clear explanations and enough time to think and respond to questions, such as asking older children what imagination or predict means. However, occasionally they miss young children's non-verbal attempts to make their needs known.
• Children benefit from small-group activities, where their key person plans for their specific next stages of learning. For example, older children become engrossed in a fun activity helping them to understand the importance of hygiene. However, high noise levels in pre-school and toddlers means that some children become distracted and cannot listen and concentrate fully.
• Leaders monitor the quality of the provision well and implement new initiatives to benefit the children. For example, they have developed a nurture room for older toddlers, to help prepare them for the larger pre-school room. Staff ensure all children, including those with special educational needs and or disabilities (SEND), move up only when feeling secure enough. Staff comment on how much they enjoy working at the setting and the good support they receive from leaders.
• Leaders use funding effectively to motivate and support individual children to make the best progress they can. Those responsible for overseeing the development of children with SEND, closely monitor the effective implementation of children's targets and share this regularly with parents. Staff training helps to develop staff skills, to have the greatest impact on children's development, such as sign language and an awareness of autism.
• Parents confirm how well leaders and staff work in partnership with them. For example, they share information on babies' routines, working together closely with potty training and supporting children's next stages of development. Parents comment on the kind and caring staff, who are incredibly supportive to not only their children but to them also.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• improve the organisation of group-time activities, to enable all children to listen and concentrate fully
• extend staff's awareness of recognising young children's non-verbal communications, to meet their needs even more successfully.