Drayton House Day Nursery and Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children enter confidently, eager to start their busy day ahead. Friendly staff greet them warmly and children settle quickly at their chosen activity. Staff create a calm and inviting learning environment that inspires children to explore the resources they are interested in. Children form close relationships with their key persons, who know them well. They clearly feel safe and secure. Children benefit from staff's consistent routines across the nursery and from an early age, know what is expected of them. They respond positively to staff's enthusiasm to help them learn, develop and cooperate with others.

Children make good progress and gain the skills they need to prepare them for their eventual move to school. They become independent in their self-care and hygiene routines. For example, babies learn to hold spoons and feed themselves. Toddlers use a fork and spoon to scoop up vegetables and pre-school children show good control when using a knife to push their food onto the fork. Staff's qualities of kindness and compassion are well matched by children. This is illustrated by how well they care for their nursery pet dog. For example, they understand that he needs regular exercise, food and water to remain healthy. Children relate these care needs to their own, which helps them understand how to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

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

• The experienced and well-qualified provider leads the nursery and staff team with professionalism. They share a strong commitment to provide the best possible care and education for all children. The provider supports staff to offer an inclusive service. For example, staff successfully support children who speak English as an additional language. They use basic signs and visual aids to help children understand and express themselves. In addition, the provider makes effective use of additional funding for those children who have this entitlement. For instance, staff create a range of home learning packs to continue children's learning at home. This is a successful process that has been cascaded to all children and their families.
• The provider and staff team give great importance to outdoor learning. All children spend lots of quality time in the nursery garden. They thoroughly enjoy being active in the fresh air and love to choose from the wide range of activities available to them. For example, babies love pushing and watching what happens to wheeled toys on a bridge. Toddlers hide their model dinosaurs in mud, asking others to find them and pre-school children negotiate their roles when playing hide and seek with their friends.
• Across the nursery, staff promote children's love for books very well. They provide a wide variety of story and information books, indoors and outdoors.
• Children love to hear stories being read to them again and again. Younger children listen with great focus to stories staff read to them. They eagerly point at pictures and remember some words. Staff in the pre-school room frequently use books to introduce a topic of interest, such as how rainbows are formed. In addition, singing is part of each room's daily routine and children join in with enthusiasm. These activities help to successfully increase children's vocabulary.
• The provider and staff team are reflective practitioners who continually strive to improve their practice. Most staff can clearly describe the curriculum which is newly created to reflect staff's, children's and parents' views. However, there is a tendency for some staff to focus more on the end goal for children. The curriculum is not yet sequenced precisely enough to ensure that the skills towards achieving an end goal are securely embedded in a step-by-step way. This means that the new curriculum is not yet delivered consistently by the whole staff team.
• Staff work as a cohesive team in their own rooms and across the nursery. However, the provider does not monitor staff's practice closely enough to ensure that each member has the targeted support they need to improve their interactions with children. Although all staff are caring in their approach, some are more confident and effective than others in their teaching. This leads to minor inconsistencies in the quality of children's learning experiences.
• The provider and staff team highly value children's home cultures. They gather important information from parents about their home lives, traditions and faiths. Staff use these details to raise children's awareness of the diverse world they live in. For example, they invite parents from different cultures to come to the nursery and share their ways of life, traditions and artefacts. In this way, children compare similarities and differences between their own lives and those of others. This helps to illustrate that there is a real sense of community, with children at the heart of everything staff do.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• refine the curriculum to ensure it is well planned and sequenced to build on children's existing knowledge and skills
• strengthen the arrangements to monitor the quality of teaching to identify more personalised training programmes for individual staff.