Ecole Francaise De Bristol

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy and settle well in the welcoming nursery environment. Children form strong relationships with staff from the outset. Staff work very well with parents to get to know each child as an individual and they build good rapport with children's families. Parents speak very highly of the care and education their children receive at the nursery. They describe the staff as 'incredible' and 'fantastic'.

Children develop a desire to learn and are keen to get involved in the interesting activities on offer to them. All children develop their language and communication skills to a good standard in both their first language and any additional language they speak. Children develop a particularly good grasp of French and English during their time at the nursery and become confident bilingual communicators.

All children make good progress in all areas of their learning and development, including children who have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). Staff support children's learning well. They ensure that the curriculum is well thought out to reflect the interests and needs of the children.

Children behave well. They develop good social skills and are well-mannered. This helps them build and maintain positive relationships with staff and their peers. Children make friends easily and are respectful toward others. Children are independent. For example, they prepare their own snacks and get themselves dressed in their outdoor clothes. Children develop resilience and demonstrate positive attitudes. For example, they persevere well when things are difficult.

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

• Leaders support staff to plan and implement an ambitious curriculum, and staff and leaders are passionate about what they do. Staff have good opportunities for professional development. This helps them continually enhance their knowledge and skills and improves the outcomes for children. Staff morale is high.
• Staff use their observations of children well to identify what children already know and can do, and what they need to learn next. They share their assessments with parents and give parents ideas of ways that they can help support their children's learning at home.
• The well-qualified staff team is skilled at planning broad and stimulating activities that excite and interest children. Staff's interactions with children are extremely positive. However, occasionally, particularly at times when children lead their own play, staff miss when quieter children would benefit from their attention to help extend their play and support their learning further.
• Staff place a high emphasis on helping children to manage their personal care from a young age. For example, staff have worked closely in partnership with parents to help children transition out of nappies. This helps all children to become toilet trained as early as possible.
• Staff are good teachers of mathematics. They find inventive ways to incorporate opportunities to extend children's counting skills and number knowledge into everyday activities. Children recognise numerals in print and count confidently in French and English.
• Staff deliver adult-led focused activities to further enhance children's learning. For example, they use rhyme to expand children's vocabularies and to extend their awareness of the variation in sounds between the different languages that they speak.
• Staff teach children good early literacy skills. For example, staff engage children well in storytelling activities, and children enthusiastically retell familiar stories and act out the characters in the book.
• There are routines in place that provide children with opportunities for individual and group learning. Children enjoy opportunities to be alongside their peers and staff during group learning activities. However, activities are not always successfully geared to the needs and stage of development of the youngest children. This means that, at times, some children lose focus and their attention wanders.
• Support for children with SEND is good. Staff work closely with parents and a range of early years professionals, such as speech and language therapists and portage workers. This helps to ensure that children have specifically targeted provision that is implemented well to help them make the best possible progress.
• Children learn about the wider world. Staff give children good opportunities to enrich their knowledge of communities different to their own which prepares them well for life in multicultural Britain. For example, they participate in joint activities such as science projects and dances with other French nurseries in Europe.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support staff to recognise when to enhance and extend children's play, particularly for quieter children at the nursery
• review and improve the delivery of some group activities to ensure that the younger children benefit as much as possible from these experiences.