Chartam House Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

There is plenty of laughter, joy and smiles at this welcoming nursery. Children arrive excited to greet staff and their friends. They settle with ease into their self-chosen activities. Staff get to know children well and establish trusting relationships with them from the start. Mealtimes replicate a family dynamic as children sit together with staff. This promotes their social skills and emotional well-being, and makes them feel secure and comfortable. The well-established routines help children know what is happening next and what is expected of them, which in turn means children show consistently good behaviour.

Promoting children's decision-making skills is at the forefront, such as choosing to play indoors or outdoors. Staff facilitate this process seamlessly, deploying themselves appropriately to ensure children remain safe at all times. In this way, children feel valued, knowing that their choices are important to staff.

A thoughtfully structured curriculum is strongly based on the principles of children developing curious mindsets and healthy bodies. For example, babies and young toddlers play percussion instruments. They sing along to familiar rhymes and bounce to the beat. Older children concentrate hard as they learn new yoga poses that help to increase their body flexibility. An abundance of praise echoes around the provision, as staff commend children's improving resilience and perseverance. Children relish these moments and beam with pride.

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

• Communication and language skills are taught across the setting in a sequenced way, building on what children already know. Staff provide a consistent dialogue when interacting with children. Babies begin to use sign language to express themselves, such as 'more', 'please' and 'thank you, which have been previously modelled by staff. Older children learn key words that extend their knowledge and vocabulary, such as when handling plants, they explain how the roots suck up water from the soil. All children actively listen to staff who enthusiastically share books with them. Children also select and look through books independently, clearly demonstrating a true love for books.
• The nursery chef's nutritionally balanced, home-cooked food is well received. Older children frequently ask for more helpings, saying the meals are 'delicious'. Children develop good hygiene routines from an early age, such as washing hands thoroughly before mealtimes. Babies begin to feed themselves with spoons, sensitively encouraged by staff. Older children initially use forks and then learn to use knives and forks, as their manual dexterity improves. This shows that children learn to manage their personal needs.
• Across the setting, children's imaginations are positively enhanced by staff, for example, through role play. Staff readily engage with babies who enjoy making pretend meals. Babies collect the natural items available to them in the well-presented play kitchen. Older children negotiate different roles when setting up 'home' scenarios, such as when they care for dolls, ensuring they are fed, nappies checked and remain warm with blankets. In this way, children develop their qualities of compassion and care towards others.
• The indoor environment is well-organised, with activities that appeal to children's interests and motivate them to explore and investigate. For instance, babies use big and small scoops to pour mud from one container to another, practising their transferring skills. Older children plant bulbs in mud and learn about the best conditions for growth. Outside in the garden, opportunities to build on children's natural curiosity, are less well planned. This is particularly the case for older children. Consequently, children are sometimes not focused or engaged enough to pursue, deepen and expand their own learning when outdoors.
• The pursuit for high standards of education and care are extremely apparent. Leaders continue to review, evaluate and consider ways to improve the provision for all. For example, through their monitoring of teaching, leaders have identified the need for further refinement to elevate children's natural curiosity, in the room for older children. However, on occasion, the quality of staff's interactions across the setting, is variable. Although improvement in some staff's practice is identified by leaders, precise coaching to enhance individual teaching skills, is still in it's infancy. This has an impact on children's learning.
• Parents are highly complimentary about the good education and care their children receive. They admire staff's abilities to follow their children's care routines well and form affectionate bonds. Staff provide daily updates, as well as weekly photographs and videos of their children's time at the nursery. Parents note the great progress their children make, particularly in their speech, confidence and independence.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support staff to strengthen their planning and organisation of the curriculum outdoors, in order to help older children to focus and engage more purposefully in learning
• refine and improve the coaching and mentoring arrangements for individual staff to raise the quality of interactions across the setting to a consistently high level.