Childcare@Buttershaw Christian Family Centre

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children confidently enter the nursery and benefit from a whole community approach to their care and learning. They play happily in a safe and accessible environment that supports their independence. Children receive a warm and friendly greeting from staff, who they have formed strong attachments to. This helps them to feel secure. Staff support and cheerily distract new children who are a little upset when they arrive, which means they soon settle.

Children, including those in receipt of additional funding or who have additional needs, make very good progress from their starting points in development on entry. They take part in a wealth of experiences that give them a great start in life and a positive approach to learning, in readiness for going to school. Children behave extremely well and understand expectations. For example, they promptly respond when they hear a drum to indicate tidy-up time.

Children are familiar with the nursery's routines. For example, two-year-old children help to find their labelled peg to hang up their coats. Older children find their name cards to self-register. They use the hand gel, sited at the 'hygiene station', before helping themselves to a bowl of cereal. Babies and toddlers smile and babble away at nurturing staff, who spontaneously sing songs, shake home-crafted instruments and read simple stories. This builds on their early communication skills.

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

• Staff gain important information from parents to support children's emotional well-being as they settle. As part of this, staff carry out home visits for funded two-year-old children and offer stay-and-play sessions.
• Staff effectively communicate with parents, for instance, through online platforms and progress meetings. They encourage parents to extend their children's learning, for example through activity packs. Staff provide a lending library to involve parents in supporting children's love of stories and early language.
• Staff closely monitor children's development and swiftly identify any emerging concerns. They make timely referrals to other professionals, and put in place effective early intervention strategies to help children to catch up. Staff make effective use of additional funding to improve outcomes for children.
• Children in the pre-school rooms are highly motivated and engrossed, as a result of staff's high-quality teaching. They delight in staff's interactions, which support their thinking skills. For example, as children make a guitar out of craft resources, staff encourage them to work out how to attach the pipe cleaners that represent the strings.
• Staff generally interact well with two-year-old children to build on their learning, for example, as they make dough with them. However, staff do not always recognise when children require more adult support to engage in activities and develop their language skills. Furthermore, staff who are covering are not aware of children's specific next steps in learning, which is necessary to optimise their learning.
• Staff help children to develop good physical skills. Babies pull themselves to standing and toddlers use chunky brushes. Two-year-old children enthusiastically join in with action songs and roll, pinch and pat the soft dough. Older children make patterns in dough using vegetable mashers, and focus intently while threading dried pasta onto string. They confidently climb to the top of the grass mound.
• Staff provide many opportunities for children to learn essential social skills. For example, they encourage two-year-old children to take turns to mix the dough ingredients. Older children build excellent friendships, for example while playing lotto games or engaging in role play with dolls.
• Staff support children's early independence exceptionally well. For example, children serve food and pour drinks, put on their coats and choose when to have their snack. Two-year-old children delight in choosing a favourite song from the 'nursery rhyme' board.
• Staff instil excellent messages to children about healthy lifestyles. For example, the nursery takes part in numerous oral health initiatives and children brush their teeth using a two-minute timer. Parents take home healthy recipes and can buy low-cost healthy recipe bags.
• Staff plan many activities that develop children's awareness of difference. However, they do not consistently represent the diversity of children and the families who attend, within the nursery.
• Staff's qualifications, support for their well-being, further training and constant self-evaluation has an overall positive impact. Questionnaires are readily available for parents to share their views. These are highly complimentary.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• strengthen teaching for two-year-old children, so that all staff are fully aware of how to support their individual learning needs, to fully engage them and help them to make the best possible progress
• develop the ways in which the nursery represents the children who attend, in order to help them to feel valued and included to the highest level through opportunities to observe and celebrate their own uniqueness.