Maybury Montessori

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff maintain a safe environment for children. This helps children to feel safe and secure. Children build nurturing relationships with kind and caring staff. Opportunities for babies and toddlers to benefit from close comfort and care are embedded in the staff routines. Younger and less confident children benefit from a strong focus on promoting their emotional well-being. For instance, as babies wake from their sleep, staff offer them cuddles and reassurance, helping them to become familiar with new routines.

Children enjoy a varied curriculum that motivates them to learn. All children make good progress from their starting points. Staff recognise children's individual interests and provide a wealth of opportunities for them to take part in activities they enjoy. For instance, pre-school children are excited to draw. Staff help them to look at their faces in the mirror and copy these. They talk about the changes to their facial expressions when they are happy and pretend to be sad. Children benefit from learning that is new and offers them new challenges. Staff encourage children to take part and to persist when learning is more difficult. For instance, children learn to pedal tricycles, as staff show them how to do this. They praise children for persevering, to support their growing confidence in their new abilities.

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

• Leaders have successfully addressed the actions raised at the last inspection. The new manager and staff have moved back into recently refurbished premises. Leaders and staff have improved their understanding of risk and how to address it. Staff recognise and respond well during daily routines to keep children safe. For instance, when children spill water onto the floor, staff quickly clear this away, to prevent children or staff from slipping. Partnerships with parents have improved. Where children need additional support, staff share information and strategies promptly.
• The provider and manager have worked with the local authority to seek advice and guidance on how best to support them. This has had a positive impact on the support that staff receive in their roles. Improvements to staff supervisions mean that opportunities to meet with leaders and share information about children's care, safety and development are effective. Staff feel valued and respected in their roles and feel that they are able to talk confidently to leaders about any concerns.
• From the outset, staff support children to be independent. Babies learn how to use spoons, as staff teach them how to hold them. They develop good hand-eye coordination as they move spoonfuls of foods from their bowls to their mouths. Toddlers learn how to take sips of water from cups as staff encourage and praise them. Pre-school children are able to manage their personal needs well.
• These skills help to provide children with a secure foundation on which to support their future learning.
• Overall, children behave well. Staff focus on helping children to recognise and talk about how they feel. Older children are beginning to learn to resolve minor disagreements with their peers amicably. Where younger children need additional support, staff remind children about taking turns and sharing. However, when some children struggle to make their wants and needs known, staff are not always successful in enabling them to fully express themselves. At times, this hinders some aspects of children's social development.
• Staff provide plenty of opportunities for children to be physically active throughout the day. Children learn about the benefits of being active and develop good coordination skills. For instance, they run to chase their friends and push themselves along on ride-on bicycles, safely manoeuvring around their peers. Children's active play helps to support them in learning the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.
• Teaching is good. Staff know what children are able to do and ensure that learning builds on children's abilities. Children, including those who speak English as an additional language, are immersed in a language-rich environment. Staff speak to children, modelling new words for them to hear. Babies babble, and some older children use good thinking skills to answer staff questions. However, at times, some learning is not tailored precisely to what some younger children need to learn next, particularly in relation to furthering their speaking skills.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• enhance staff understanding of how to use their knowledge of what children know and can do to plan more precisely for their next steps in learning
• develop the use of techniques that encourage and support children to communicate their wants, needs and ideas more consistently.