Newburgh All Round Care

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children thrive at this exceptional, highly stimulating nursery where they are excited, safe and motivated to learn. Valuable home visits contribute towards the special relationships that children immediately form with all staff. This helps children to quickly settle and start learning from day one. Children demonstrate exceptionally high levels of confidence and security in the setting. Relationships between staff, children and their peers are extremely respectful. Children are keen to take on small responsibilities, such as tidying away and getting ready for snack. Their efforts are rewarded with praise. Staff skilfully help children to become fully independent and capable of looking after their personal needs. Staff ensure that children understand the benefits of healthy lifestyles, such as eating a balanced diet and taking exercise.

Children's speech and language development are a high priority. Staff introduce new words such as 'cement', 'hard hat' and 'crane', while in the construction area. Children repeat these and staff add one new word to children's contributions to help extend vocabulary. Furthermore, children are supported in the role-play area to cook from a recipe book. When dry pasta drops children exclaim, 'I can hear a clatter bang' as it hits the table. Staff allow children plenty of time to speak and they respond thoughtfully to children's ideas. Staff encourage children to care for living things and watch them grow. For example, children help to care for chicks that hatch at the nursery, and study life cycles of frogs and butterflies. This helps children to learn about nurture and wellbeing. Children make substantial progress from their starting points and become more than ready for school.

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

• The headteacher provides immense support for staff both emotionally and professionally. She follows robust performance-management procedures through which she guides and trains staff to ensure they meet her extremely high standards. Staff benefit from fantastic opportunities to develop professionally. For example, they are supported by the headteacher to gain top qualifications and become extremely knowledgeable about how to best support young children, to make the highest levels of progress in their learning and development.
• The curriculum is broad, balanced and stimulating. Staff plan activities thoughtfully, ensuring that they appeal to children's interests and meet their next learning steps exceptionally well. Children access a wealth of high-quality outdoor learning activities, including those that promote children's physical, communication and creative development. Children learn to take risks and explore the natural environment during forest-school sessions.
• Staff demonstrate exemplary teaching skills through which they provide children with wonderful opportunities to use critical-thinking skills and to extend their thoughts. For example, when children want to make skeletons out of dough, staff ask them how they will do this. Staff ask cleverly worded questions to empower children to lead their learning. Early reading, writing and mathematics are integral to everything that is taught at the nursery. Expert staff have identified different starting points for children in communication and language and have put in place highly successful strategies, which help children make rapid progress.
• The senior leaders' passion for children's readiness for school is exceptional. For example, to strengthen the teaching of sounds that letters represent, the leaders have arranged a workshop for parents who are less confident in their knowledge of phonics, to enable them to continue to support their children at home. This exceptionally supports children's learning, both at the nursery and at home.
• Staff provide tailored settling-in arrangements to help children feel secure from the start. They involve all children effectively and know them very well. Children develop a wonderful sense of self and know what makes them unique. Their backgrounds, interests and experiences are valued immensely and become an integral part of the setting. For example, when children show an interest in owls, they learn about nocturnal animals all around the world using pictures or photos. Children's home cultures are celebrated enthusiastically. Parents are welcomed warmly and frequently share aspects of children's home lives with the group.
• Staff focus on developing children's confidence, independence and communication skills. They support children successfully with all these skills, for example, when sticking their name on the register tree. Staff have interesting conversations with children and share books, introducing unfamiliar words so that children become fluent speakers with an extensive vocabulary. Carefully planned small-group activities target children who need additional support.
• Children behave impeccably. They understand extremely well how to manage their feelings. For instance, weekly sessions create a quiet space where children feel secure and calm, and children learn yoga and breathing exercises to help them. Staff are wonderful role models as they treat everyone with respect and kindness.
• Staff involve parents fully in their children's learning. They use highly informative newsletters, meetings and secure social media to keep parents very well informed about what children have been doing. They have frequent access to planning and learning records. Staff share book bags that illustrate ideas for children's activities at home with reading. Parents comment that they are fully involved in their children's development. Parents value the time that children spend outdoors in the fresh air and visiting days that are organised, such as 'grandparents day' and trips to the nearby vegetable farm.