Jesters Childcare Beaulieu

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Parents and children are warmly greeted by the friendly and professional staff. Children arrive happy and quickly engage in their chosen activity within the stimulating learning environment both indoors and outdoors. Babies are confident and curious. They are fascinated by the movement of coloured lights suspended from the ceiling. Staff are highly responsive to their immediate interests. They introduce babies to counting the lights, naming the colours and extend their inquisitiveness by changing the colour of the lights. This sustains their concentration for a significant period of time and babies begin to correctly name the colour of each light.

Younger children pretend to write a shopping list and are eager to talk about the food that they like to eat. They use their senses to explore a wealth of natural materials, such as leaves and wooden curtain rings. Children develop good control and coordination as they thread the curtain rings onto a short wooden pole. Older children persevere to solve problems for themselves. They work out how to join large, shaped pieces of construction parts together to create complex structures. Children are eager to express their creativity. They use dough, sticks and wool to make their own interpretation of the main character from the 'book of the month'.

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

• Staff know the children that they care for well. They take full consideration of children's interests, past and current experiences to provide a sequenced curriculum. Staff identify any gaps in children's learning and plan activities to swiftly close them.
• Staff place a strong emphasis on promoting children's language skills. For example, they sing familiar songs and nursery rhymes to babies. This motivates babies to babble and begin to copy sounds. Staff consistently respond. This helps babies to learn the pattern of conversation. Staff's use of questioning encourages younger children to respond and practise the new words they learn. Older children use complex sentences to explain how they made a 'stick man'.
• Children benefit from the priority staff place on meeting their emotional needs. The flexible key-person system enables children to form natural bonds with staff. This has a positive impact in helping children to swiftly settle and feel safe and secure. Babies enjoy cuddles with their key person and confidently play peek-a-boo with visitors.
• Staff help babies to develop their core muscles in readiness for walking. All children engage in a good range of activities to build on their physical skills. They enjoy healthy foods and spend quality time outdoors in the fresh air. Children learn to take manageable risks. They use wooden planks and crates to build structures that they carefully balance along.
• Children behave well and show from an early age that they understand the boundaries in place. Babies share musical instruments and older children build friendly relationships. Staff successfully support children to regulate their own behaviour and help them to explore their feelings about new experiences in their life.
• Staff work in partnership with parents to support children who speak English as an additional language and those with special educational needs and/or disabilities. This helps to ensure that all children make good progress. Parents are complimentary of the service the setting provides; they describe the staff as 'fantastic'.
• Children show that they understand routines. They gather on the carpet for group time, where staff use good intonation in their voice to read the 'book of the month' and encourage children to join in with the words and actions to songs. However, staff do not adapt their teaching to maintain children's listening and attention during group activities. As a result, some children eventually leave the group.
• The management team is ambitious. The team is highly reflective of the service it offers and fully considers the views of staff, children and parents. Plans are in place to join an accreditation scheme. The management team provides staff with opportunities to complete training. However, supervision meetings and observations of staff practice do not precisely identify and support staff to continue to develop their practice to the highest level.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• adapt teaching within group activities to consistently support children's listening and attention skills
• strengthen the quality of supervisions to sharply focus on raising the quality of practice to the highest level.