Chestnut@Gascoigne

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff provide children with exceptional quality interactions at this stimulating and inviting nursery. Children are greeted with the warmest of welcomes by staff. Children are curious and engage with the stimulating learning opportunities that staff provide. This helps them to gain new knowledge or practise and master new skills. Staff expertly guide children's learning and development, particularly in meeting their next steps, by including their interests to keep them engaged and motivated. For example, recently, children have enjoyed learning about different fruits. Staff arranged a fruit cutting activity to support children develop their fine motor skills. Children work in small groups and name the different fruits. They use their senses to smell and taste, and describe the texture and taste.

Staff consistently reinforce learning through the repetition of new vocabulary and language. This supports children with speech and language delay to learn new vocabulary and improve their communication and language skills.

Leaders and managers have supported staff to create an ambitious curriculum, prioritising children's personal, social and emotional development. Staff understand this focus and always skilfully engage and interact with children. For example, staff offer opportunities twice a day to help children to recognise, name and express their feelings during circle time. They learn new vocabulary to describe different emotions and their meaning. This helps them to learn how to manage their behaviour and emotions extremely well, and understand the impact of their actions on others. Staff are excellent role models and encourage children to form respectful bonds with each other.

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

• Managers support staff to develop exceptional key-person systems that support children extremely well. Staff complete accurate assessments of children's learning. They use knowledge of their key children to carefully plan for what children need to learn next. Staff offer an appropriately challenging and ambitious curriculum for all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and the most-disadvantaged children. The nursery has a trained special educational needs coordinator, who works closely with staff and delivers high-quality interventions to children with SEND.
• Staff have extremely high expectations of what all children can achieve. They develop an exceptionally positive and emotionally safe environment where simple rules and routines are sensitively and consistently reinforced. Children engage in activities for an extended period of time. For instance, children enjoy working in small groups independently. They use different-size containers to fill bottles in the water area. Children use language such as 'more', 'less' and 'full' to compare which bottle holds more water. Children enjoy problem-solving activities. For example, they place saucepans and spoons of different sizes to the correct-size circle and spoon shadow when tidying up.
• Staff's engagement and interactions with children are inspirational, and children demonstrate excellent conversational skills. Staff expertly apply a variety of teaching skills to check children's understanding of unfamiliar words and to regularly introduce new vocabulary. For example, staff skilfully explain the word 'terrific' to older children, who did not know the meaning of the word. Staff encourage children to say 'terrific' by clapping the syllables in the word. Children used this word in context afterwards, to praise their friends for their 'terrific' handwriting.
• Managers make highly effective use of early years pupil premium funding to support children's needs. For example, children develop their gross motor skills and key skills related to sports, such as football, from a coach once a week. The coach trains the nursery staff on the weekly skill. This helps staff to effectively support children to practise this skill throughout the week. This has an exceptional impact on the children's gross motor skill development.
• Staff provide lots of opportunities for children to develop different mathematical concepts indoors and outdoors. For example, children count the number of times that they successfully throw the ball through the hoop.
• Staff support children to develop a love of reading and books. They provide opportunities for children to immerse themselves in a text for a whole month through initiatives, including 'book of the month'. For example, in the pre-school, children are currently reading 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'. Staff used funding to enhance children's experience of this book by purchasing caterpillars and leaving them in the environment for children to observe. This led to children learning about the lifecycle of a butterfly over several weeks and securing a deeper understanding of the text. Children also discuss healthy and unhealthy food by recalling parts of the story.
• The manager is inspirational. She supports staff to enhance their knowledge and practice by creating bespoke training packages for each individual staff member. She is extremely organised and works with the exceptionally knowledgeable executive manager to ensure that all staff receive regular coaching and mentoring. This has resulted in the nursery gaining recognition for all staff successfully completing their paediatric first-aid training. In addition, the nursery received other awards for their exceptional work around healthy eating.
• Managers and staff build exceptional partnerships with parents. Parents are extremely complimentary of the staff and the work that they do to support their children to make progress. Parents welcome the opportunity to read a book to the children in their child's room. The nursery also provides home learning packs to ensure consistency with learning at nursery and home.