Happy Feet Preschool and Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy and eager to start their day at this warm and welcoming nursery. Children quickly snuggle in with staff to read their favourite stories. Staff are animated with their voices as they pretend to be the different characters in the story. This helps children to develop their listening skills. All children, including children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), make good progress in their development in readiness for future learning.

Leaders develop an ambitious curriculum based on what children enjoy. For example, staff use children's recent interest in builders to introduce new concepts. For instance, children transfer wooden blocks between buckets on a large weighing scale. They work together with their friends, moving blocks between the tipping buckets. This helps them to develop their problem-solving skills as they balance the weight on the scales. Children begin to understand new concepts such as weight, contributing to their early mathematical development.

Staff have high expectations of children's behaviour. They have developed a clear routine for children. This helps children to know what is expected of them. Staff successfully use visual resources to help children understand and take turns. Children respond positively to staff and behave well.

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

• Since the last inspection, the nursery has benefited from the support and guidance from outside agencies, such as the local authority. Leaders are proactive in making improvements to the nursery. For example, they embed staff supervisions. This helps leaders identify training that has contributed to raising the quality of the nursery. As such, staff have a clear understanding of the learning intentions within their curriculum, which is well sequenced to help children remember previous learning.
• Staff carefully plan targeted interventions to enable children to reach their full potential. For instance, they use training to deliver sessions to help children develop their speech and language skills. Children are highly engaged. Staff introduce simple but purposeful words to help children develop their early vocabulary. This helps all children, including children with SEND, to become confident communicators.
• Staff collect information from parents when children first begin, to help with planning for their individual needs. This helps them support babies' unique sleeping patterns. For instance, they follow their home routines. However, they have not yet considered ways to seek and share information with other settings that children attend, to fully support children's continuity of learning.
• Staff build on what children already know and can do. For example, children create ladybirds by painting half an apple and using a cotton bud to paint spots. Staff encourage children to count the number of black spots and sensitively repeat this back with the children. This helps develop children's early counting skills.
• Staff are positive role models that teach children to be kind and respect their environment. They have recently taken part in training to support children's positive behaviours. Staff weave this into the children's learning. For example, children gently hold newly hatched ducklings and talk about being soft and kind. This helps children learn about treating living things with respect and care.
• Staff promote children's physical development very well. They ensure that babies have ample room to cruise and develop their core muscles for later walking. Older children climb and develop their balance as they walk on large wooden wheels in the garden. Furthermore, children use various one-handed tools for painting and gluing. This helps children develop their hand muscles for later writing.
• Mostly, staff promote children's independence and personal hygiene practices. For example, children pour their own drinks at mealtimes and hang their own belongings up when they start their day. However, at times, hygiene procedures are not always fully embedded in staff's practice. For example, on occasion, they do not consistently wash their hands and encourage children to wash their hands before they eat.
• Partnerships with parents are strong. Staff regularly communicate with parents so they can continue their children's learning at home. Parents are extremely pleased with the help given to them and their children, to ensure that any additional support needed is accessed as soon as possible. This helps to ensure that children's individual needs are met.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• strengthen partnerships with other settings that children attend, to promote a consistent approach to children's learning
• review and improve hygiene practices so they are understood by the staff and consistently followed, to ensure high levels of hygiene standards.