Challengers Farnham

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children arrive happy and confident in this welcoming setting. They are greeted by enthusiastic staff who know them and their families well. As a result, children settle quickly and feel safe and secure. Children benefit from warm interactions from nurturing, caring staff. They seek out their key worker for cuddles and reassurance. This helps to develop their confidence and raise their self-esteem. Children become familiar with the daily routines. Staff use effective strategies to support children's individual needs well. For example they use pictures and signing to help children understand routines and what is happening next. Children relate to this well and remain calm as new transitions happen at different times of the day. They explore and investigate activities and resources with interest. Children sustain their focus and attention during their self-chosen play. For example, they persevere when completing puzzles and explore coloured paper and glue creating pictures. Children spend time developing their creative ideas as they explore foam, sand and glue. This helps to develop their creativity and hand-to-eye coordination. Children benefit from attentive staff, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). For example, when children's emotions escalate, staff use strategies to positively calm them. This helps children to regain focus in their learning.

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

• Staff are skilled at supporting children to manage their emotions. They sit with the children and talk in a calm manner. Staff use sensory resources and the soft-play area to gently focus the children. Children trust them and react positively to the strategies used. Staff support children's behaviour well and provide appropriate guidance and explanations. They understand individual children's behaviours and how to guide them sensitively.
• Leaders are extremely knowledgeable about how best to support children with SEND. The provision for children with SEND is a strength in the nursery. The special educational needs coordinator (SENDCo) is committed to ensuring that all children can access and benefit from the curriculum. This enables the nursery to ensure that children with SEND are off to a good start. Children in receipt of additional funding are very well supported. The effective key-person system and accurate use of assessment mean that gaps in children's learning and any specific needs are identified early and acted on quickly. This means that children make the best possible progress from their individual starting points.
• Parents are extremely complimentary of the setting. They say that they are kept up to date about their children's development, activities and routines. Parents appreciate how supportive the staff are, and comment that they are 'brilliant'.
• Children develop good physical skills. For example, they are encouraged to explore different movements during soft play, such as walking up steps and finding different ways to come down slopes and balance. Staff offer lots of praise, helping children's emotional well-being effectively.
• Children make good progress. Staff are aware of what children know and can do. They plan activities that interest and enthuse children. However, on some occasions, staff do not implement the curriculum intent specifically enough. This means that not all activities fully challenge children and build on their prior knowledge.
• Staff attend regular supervision sessions with the manager. This gives them opportunities to discuss their roles and key children. The manager has a good oversight of the nursery's quality and evaluates the setting well. Regular communication, meetings and involvement from everyone contribute to this well.
• Younger children with limited language model the actions to a familiar rhyme, in the absence of the song, without prompt. They take pleasure in pointing to the ceiling, then to the floor, followed by the window and the door. This shows existing knowledge of the literature explored. Although staff support children's communication skills well overall, some younger children spend longer than they need with their dummies in their mouths. This limits their opportunities to use the words and phrases they are hearing and learning.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support staff to implement the curriculum intent more sharply to build on what children already know and raise the quality of education to a higher level
• review the policy on the use of dummies to support younger children to confidently spend less time using their dummies, so they have more opportunities to use the words and phrases they are learning.