Maple Lodge Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children learn to share, take turns and be kind to their friends at this welcoming and friendly nursery. They form close bonds with staff, who are responsive, caring and warm. Staff provide strong support for children's personal, social and emotional development. They encourage children to explore their feelings, using displays that show different types of emotions. Staff provide gentle reminders to children about positive behaviour. They give clear explanations about the impact children's behaviour can have on others. Staff give clear praise and encouragement. This helps to raise children's confidence and self-esteem.

Children are happy, curious and enthusiastic. They use all their senses as they explore a pretend dinosaur swamp staff have made, using bran flakes, soil and herbs. They bathe baby dolls with sponges and water and explore with soil and sand. Additional funding is spent on helping children to benefit from settled and secure routines. Staff use visual prompts to help explain the daily routine to children and to support them to understand what will happen next. They provide strong support for children's growing independence. Children tidy away their toys and wash their hands before mealtimes. They serve their own cereal and pour their own drinks.

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

• Staff know the children well as individuals. They plan activities and experiences that they know will challenge and interest them. Staff assess well where children are in their development and plan how to embed and extend their learning further.
• There is strong support for children's physical development. Outside, in the spacious, enclosed garden, children benefit from good opportunities to stretch, balance and climb.
• Staff plan interesting and exciting activities to help children develop different ways of using their hands. They practise unscrewing lids on jam jars and threading cereal hoops on straws. Young children wave scarves, push spools and play with dough. This helps to prepare them for later tasks, such as tying their shoelaces and early writing.
• Overall, there is good support for children's developing speech and language skills. Staff use stories, songs and rhymes to help extend children's vocabularies. The introduction of signing with children, following staff training, has been particularly successful.
• Children hear lots of language throughout the day as staff talk to them about their play. However, staff are not always deployed effectively at group times. This impacts on support for children's listening and attention skills.
• Some staff settle children at the beginning of story time. However, this approach is not consistent across the nursery. This means that some children are not ready to listen and learn.
• Staff encourage children's mathematical understanding. Children count the slices of cucumber, radish and tomatoes they use to make pictures of caterpillars. They discuss the colours of paint they choose and guess what might happen to colours when paints are mixed together.
• There are good opportunities for children to learn about the natural world. They plant flowers and learn about how they grow. Children observe how caterpillars develop over time and watch chicks hatch. They talk with staff about cocoons and pretend to make their own, as they play imaginatively with scarves and blankets outside.
• Staff provide strong support for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. They work closely with other professionals in education and health to help ensure a consistent approach to support for children. This includes when children move on to school or the next stage of their learning.
• Parents speak highly of the nursery and staff team. They say that staff are nurturing and excellent at building relationships with children. Parents praise the home-made, healthy meals on offer and the effective systems in place for communication.
• The manager provides strong support for her staff team, including for their well-being. She provides support for staff's professional development through meetings, constructive feedback and opportunities for training.
• The manager and senior staff are reflective and committed to continuously improving the service they provide. The manager is passionate about outcomes for children. She and her staff team are dedicated to providing a quality experience for children in their care.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• review the deployment of staff to better support children's listening and attention skills during group times
• develop a consistent approach to settling children at the beginning of story time so that they are ready to listen and learn.