Inside Out Day Nursery LTD

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are greeted with warmth and enthusiasm by staff when they arrive at the setting with their parents. Staff take time to find out about how the children are feeling and learn about any special events or news that children might like to share. During the day staff talk to the children about their home and family to create an environment in which children can feel emotionally secure. Children happily share news about their new siblings and what their parents are doing at work, while they are at nursery.

Children learn about how to keep themselves and others safe. Staff take a consistent approach to teaching children about the boundaries for their behaviour while at the nursery. They talk to all children, including those who may have difficulty understanding the information, in an appropriate way about using 'kind hands' and 'walking feet', for example. Children move around the indoor and outdoor areas freely, but carefully.

Children explore and investigate their surroundings and the activities staff plan for them. Staff take time to introduce children to new experiences, show an interest in what children do and stimulate children's curiosity. Outdoors children find out about plants as staff encourage them to feel the leaves. They initiate their own games, such as hide and seek, which staff use to continue their curriculum focus on children's counting skills.

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

• Leaders have a good understanding of the early years foundation stage areas of learning. Their curriculum is built from this and they have clear expectations of what they want children to learn in each of the nursery rooms. The curriculum is strongly focused on developing children's communication and language skills, their social skills and their physical strength and coordination. At times, however, staff identify too many learning intentions to work on in a single activity. Staff then lose focus and fail to implement the intended learning outcomes.
• Babies play in an environment designed by staff to help them to develop their core strength and start to move around. For instance, staff place furniture so that babies who are showing an interest in bearing weight on their feet can practise pulling themselves up to a standing position.
• Staff take time to speak to children about things that interest them. Children playing with model sea creatures encounter new words and knowledge when a staff member joins them as they play. The children learn about what the creatures like to eat and find out their names, such as 'stingray'. Children remember this and make good attempts at saying difficult words, such as 'octopus'. While staff provide children with new and interesting vocabulary and model good sentence structure, there are times when words are changed. Occasionally, staff use words such as 'doggy' and 'birdy 'with the younger children. This does not provide the children with the correct words to add to their vocabulary.
• Staff use everyday activities and routines to develop children's counting skills. Younger children learn to count, saying numbers in the correct order. As the children become more confident, staff introduce counting objects using activities such as games, where children need to move counters on a number of spaces. Other mathematical concepts, such as size and shape are not as prominent in staff's conversations with children, with the potential for gaps in knowledge to be created.
• Leaders and staff know the children very well. They are keenly aware of the children at the nursery who may have special educational needs and/or disabilities. They work closely with families to develop consistent strategies to work with the children to help them to integrate into the nursery and make the progress they are capable of. Staff are very aware of when children are beginning to struggle with their emotions, and use activities that they know will help the children to remain calm and re-join the main group quickly.
• Staff promote children's health and well-being throughout the nursery day. Children respond positively to the praise they receive when they do something well, which gives them the incentive to try again while staff watch. From a young age children's preferences are respected by staff. At lunchtime children are guided by staff to the buffet-style lunch and choose what they would like on their plate. Children are keen to try the array of colourful salad vegetables alongside cooked meat and cheese.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• develop staff skills in how they speak to young children so that they teach children how to say grammatically correct words
• improve staff's teaching of mathematical concepts to more frequently go beyond counting and number recognition
• increase staff confidence in how to identify more precisely what they want children to learn from an activity so that the teaching matches the intention.