Little Rockets Childcare - Langney

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The staff team, including the managers, creates a warm, friendly atmosphere. Children play happily as they explore the resources and activities on offer. Staff plan and deliver an ambitious curriculum that is precisely targeted to reflect children's individual learning needs.

Staff place a very strong focus on promoting children's emotional well-being. The sensitive support that individual children receive helps them to gain confidence and to develop their social skills. Children learn to interact positively with others and to make friendships. Throughout the nursery, they engage in animated conversation and spend much of their time laughing as they share their views and make jokes with staff. For example, children spontaneously call out their favourite colours as they bounce coloured balls on a parachute and point out that the red ball looks like a clown's nose.

Children thoroughly enjoy pretend role-play games. For example, they prepare food and drinks for staff who skilfully ask questions and introduce ideas that extend children's understanding and enhance their enjoyment.

Children understand the routines of the day and enjoy helping with tasks such as tidying away toys. They understand what is expected of them and behave well.

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

• The leadership and management of the nursery is strong and effective. Staff are highly motivated and work well together. This helps to create a positive, efficient environment where children's care and learning needs are met well. Managers recognise and nurture the skills and expertise within the staff team and encourage staff to attend training to enhance and update their knowledge.
• There are good arrangements to coordinate the care of children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. Staff work effectively with parents and other relevant professionals to assess and meet the needs of individual children.
• Staff are very successful in their aim to promote children's communication. All children, including babies, spend their time in environments that are rich in language. Staff working with babies use animated and encouraging facial expressions. They speak to them as they play and while addressing their care needs, emphasising key words which babies quickly come to recognise and understand. Older children use their rapidly developing vocabularies to express themselves clearly and to ask questions to reinforce their learning.
• Staff support children to make good progress in their physical development. Those working with babies know how to encourage them to reach, pull themselves up and gain their balance as they get ready for walking. Staff provide older children with a range of activities to develop their strength and coordination. For example, children have great fun as they balance on coloured platforms arranged like stepping stones. They carefully negotiate the different heights and shapes and take pride in reaching the end without touching the floor. Children also enjoy playing on a large climbing platform with a slide. Staff are vigilant in their supervision of this equipment and are sometimes too quick to offer children support. Although this is intended to promote children's safety, it does not support them to test their own physical capabilities and assess risks for themselves.
• Each child is assigned a key person who effectively monitors their progress and identifies what they need to learn or master next. This, along with the strong teaching, helps to ensure that all children achieve well. In other respects, the key-person system is slightly less effective. The organisation of some parts of the routine mean that children do not consistently benefit from having their needs met by their special, trusted carer. This does not fully reflect the nursery ethos of promoting children's emotional well-being, which is otherwise very well embedded.
• Communication with parents is effective. Staff and parents use a secure online system to share information about children's progress. There have recently been improvements in the support for parents to extend their child's learning at home. These include a lending library for books and the introduction of resource bags to enable parents to carry out children's favourite activities.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• extend further the support for older children to explore, understand and expand their physical capabilities
• review and improve the key-person system to enable children, particularly the youngest, to benefit from having their care needs addressed by their trusted, special carer.