Castle Kindergarten

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff provide a nurturing and supportive environment where children thrive in the care of the dedicated staff team. Staff prioritise building secure, trusting relationships with children. Their enthusiasm for learning is contagious, and children delight in the positive interactions with staff and friends, such as when painting in the garden.

Staff in the nursery provide a broad and ambitious curriculum for children. They make good use of a range of key texts to support children's development across all areas of learning. For instance, children are supported to explore their knowledge of story characters and engage in high-quality discussions while painting vegetables to create representations of the characters. Staff carefully plan the indoor and outdoor learning environments to meet the needs and interests of children. Children are supported to become curious and independent learners.

Behaviour in the nursery is very good. The well-embedded transitions and routines ensure that there is a calm and purposeful atmosphere. Staff are organised and well prepared for all elements of the nursery day. All children are well engaged and are making good progress during their time there. This prepares them well for the transition to school.

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

• Leaders have worked hard since the recent registration of this nursery to ensure that they provide children with a high-quality, safe learning environment. Senior leaders are actively involved in the day-to-day running of the nursery, including role modelling good practice and coaching staff within the nursery rooms. This has a very positive impact on the success of the nursery.
• Leaders place high value on the relationship between the nursery and parents and carers. They take careful note of all feedback and utilise this information to design staff training to ensure that, where needed, improvements are made. This includes raising the quality of daily handovers. Parents say they are very happy with the nursery and state that their children are making very good progress there. They particularly praise the friendliness of all members of staff and have found it to be a very supportive nursery.
• Staff consider how to encourage all children to develop good personal care habits, such as handwashing before mealtimes, and this good practice starts in the baby room. The positive relationships with parents are utilised to provide ongoing support that is consistent between home and the nursery, for instance with toilet training.
• The well-established routines in the nursery ensure that transitions between different periods of the day are smooth and positive for all children. For instance, young babies are given their lunchtime solid meal while their bottle of milk cools. This means there is no delay in giving babies their milk, which takes place while they are snuggled in a cosy rocking chair. They are then settled down for their afternoon sleep. These well-planned routines ensure that babies are extremely settled and happy in the nursery. The calm, well-organised environment also contributes to children's positive behaviours and attitudes towards learning throughout the nursery.
• There is a chatty environment in the nursery. Staff enthusiastically talk to children as they play and take part in activities. They model vocabulary, read high-quality texts and sing songs, which all contribute to children's developing understanding of language. However, at times, adults' talking is overly used, and not enough time is provided for children to listen, think and respond when staff talk to them. This reduces opportunities for children to use and practise their own speaking skills.
• Staff engage well with all children and are always on hand to support and interact during play. However, the quality of these interactions is not always well aligned to the curriculum aims for the age-phase room children are in. While staff understand the broad intentions of the curriculum, their knowledge is not consistently deep enough to match support precisely to children's developmental needs. This reduces how effectively some child-led activities promote children's next steps in learning.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• further develop strategies to support children's language and communication so that they have more time to process their thoughts and responses when adults interact with them
• support staff to gain a deeper understanding of the intended curriculum so that they consistently provide the right level of support for differently aged children with even greater precision.