Fairview Fledglings

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy, content and confident, and have close relationships with all staff. This helps them to feel safe, secure and reassured. Children explore their environment confidently, making choices for themselves in their play. They are encouraged to test their confidence by trying new activities. For example, toddlers climb the steps of the slide all by themselves. They manage to negotiate the top step, sit down and slide down on their own for the first time. Children's smiles and their cheers shows how proud they are of their achievements.

Children develop good independence skills. This helps to support their readiness for school. Children serve their own meals, fill up their water bottles, find their shoes and put on their coats. Young children show emerging skills to tell staff when they are tired, when they are thirsty and when they need a cuddle.

Children's language and communication is promoted very strongly throughout the nursery. Young children confidently express themselves in non-verbal forms, through gestures, expressions and simple signs. Older children use complex vocabulary to express themselves through their play and to make their needs known. Children thoroughly enjoy stories. They show emotions throughout the stories to show an understanding of the storyline.

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

• Children explore and experiment in their play. They show curiosity and wonder at their new findings. For example, children enjoy moving the rope swing in different directions to make it move in a circle. Younger children show pride in their achievements, such as learning to pull the spray bottle trigger to make the water shoot. They work out how far the water can shoot from the bottle and how the colour of the bricks on the wall change when they are sprayed.
• Staff have a very competent knowledge and practice of allowing children to lead the play. They encourage children's skills to extend, develop and enhance their learning through conversations, suggestions, questions, demonstrations as positive role models and working together. They recognise most aspects of children's play as a positive experience, especially when children lead the play themselves. However, on some occasions, they do not evaluate the effectiveness of activities and routines on children's ongoing development. Staff's positive practice and engagement are not always continued within routine parts of the day, such as lunchtime. Therefore, children's learning is not always promoted to the same high level during these times.
• Children develop close friends and relationships with each other. Staff step in at opportune times to support this further. They help children to understand when to allow others in to their play and to support collaborative and cooperative play.
• Children develop strong physical skills. Young children learn to climb simple steps to see what is going on in the other garden. They explore the space around them, discovering new physical skills such as negotiating and walking on small pebbles. Older children recognise the need for others to complete physical tasks. They share the rocker and tell each other when to move to make it tip up. They develop small muscle groups well, making marks for a purpose with water and paintbrushes and undoing lids of water bottles. They manage to turn taps to fill it back up. Younger children pull expandable tubes to make a noise and develop grips with their hands.
• Management and staff work cohesively to support each other, especially throughout the pandemic. They strive to provide a happy, safe and secure environment for children and their families, to enable children to develop to their full potential. Management and staff are eager to improve. They show high levels of enthusiasm when they gain further information to change practice and to look at the impact this has on children's learning and experiences.
• Parents make very positive comments about their children's time at the nursery. They strongly appreciate the flexible approach to the times children attend, to meet their working needs. Parents talk positively about how staff endeavour to meet children's additional needs, be they dietary or physical. They work closely with other professionals to promote a consistent approach to the individual care children require.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• develop staff's evaluation of the effectiveness of some daily routines and use staff's observations of how children play more effectively to promote children's learning further.