Flutterbies Day Nursery - Tommies Childcare

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children play in a stimulating environment and demonstrate high levels of concentration and involvement. Children and babies confidently explore and investigate different textures and practise their handling skills in a variety of ways. Due to the time of year, this includes their enjoyment of getting involved in activities using pumpkins.

Children behave well and play cooperatively. Older children talk confidently with staff and with their friends while they explore the resources that are available to them. Staff ensure that children's learning builds successfully on what they already know and can do. They work with parents to ensure that children with special educational needs and/or disabilities receive the additional support that they may need. Staff support children's communication and language development well. They encourage signing as a form of non-verbal communication while helping younger children to develop their speaking skills.

Children develop independence. This includes managing their own hygiene and personal needs. Staff support children in making independent, spontaneous decisions about their play. Children currently separate from their parents in the reception area because the nursery's COVID-19 risk assessment is that to minimise possible risks to health, parents do not enter the nursery each day. That said, special arrangements are made to address the emotional security of children new to the nursery through a planned settling-in period when parents sit with their child in the child's playroom. Children happily separate from their parents on arrival.

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

• There have been changes to the manager and the staff team during the past year. In order to maintain required staff-to-child ratios, bank staff who work for the company are supplementing the core group of key persons while recruitment continues. Procedures for recruitment, selection and induction are robust so that staff have the required skills to ensure the best outcomes for children.
• Staff initially obtain information from parents about their child's interests and about what the child knows and can do. They then continue to observe, assess and use parents' information to ensure that children are consistently challenged to reach the next stage in their learning. Children develop good skills that help them to be ready for the move on to the next stage in their education.
• Older children talk about their interests and share ideas with staff about their play. For example, they decide that they want to make different kinds of tea while playing in the water tray. They talk about the change to the colour of the water and how it began to smell when they added strawberry food colouring.
• Staff provide a wide range of sensory play experiences for babies and children under two years. These are set out on the floor so that they are accessible to crawlers as well as walkers. The babies are interested when staff show them a pumpkin, flour and wooden spoons that are set out on a large tray. Staff show babies how to scoop some of the pumpkin flesh with a spoon, while also encouraging them to explore with their hands. Staff demonstrate how they can sprinkle flour through their fingers, and the babies mimic the staff. Some children take off their shoes and socks and staff encourage them to explore the different textures with their feet as well as their hands.
• Older children spontaneously use mathematical language while they play, and staff make some references to quantities while speaking with children. However, staff do not fully support children in counting, with one-to-one correspondence or understanding and comparing quantities.
• Staff are fully aware of children's different care, medical and dietary needs. Individual care plans are easily accessible in playrooms to all staff who care for a child. Children eat healthy meals and snacks.
• Young children show a keenness for making marks. However, in the two-year-olds' play area, staff provide only small pieces of paper on a low-level table for the children to make marks with chalks. Staff do not consider whether some young children have developed the control of large muscle movements that lead to the manipulative skills that help these children limit their movements to the size of the paper provided.
• Parents share positive views about the provision. They identify ways that they feel well-informed even though they do not currently enter the playrooms.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• extend staff's practice for linking the development of young children's large muscle movements with their developing fine motor skills and pencil control
• increase support for children as they develop an understanding of, and ability to compare, different quantities.