Parkgate Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are enthusiastic and confident as they move around their room and the outside area. Two-year-old children negotiate the outside equipment. They scramble up the climbing wall with support from staff and eagerly come down by themselves. Babies learn how to take turns and wait patiently to roll their cars down ramps. They laugh and scream with delight as the car reaches the bottom, their success encourages them to do this again. Children cooperate as they play together with the toy farm animals, they move the animals around the carpet and make animal sounds. They giggle and smile and initiate their own play.

Children have an eagerness to learn and take part in activities. Pre-school children relish making play dough. They know the ingredients to use and how to make the dough. They solve the problems set by staff, such as how to divide the dough equally between themselves. They do this successfully and revel in using their small-muscle skills to manipulate the dough. Children cut out shapes from the dough and count how many they have each, and decide who has more or less. Staff introduce new words, such as 'knead and sticky' to describe what the children are doing and the textures of the dough.

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

• The manager and staff have a clear understanding of how children learn. They support children to achieve their next steps and future learning. For example, they support and extend children's communication and language development. They make eye contact with babies and repeat words to help their understanding. Two-year-old children enjoy singing to help them learn new words and staff ask pre-school children questions to enhance their thinking skills.
• Staff plan focus activities to enhance children's learning, for example story time. Children are enthusiastic about these activities at the start and eager to join in. Despite this, staff do not always encourage two-year-old children to concentrate and become involved and they soon lose their interest, become disengaged and move away.
• Overall, staff develop children's mathematical skills. They encourage pre-school children to recognise numbers and begin simple addition calculations. However, staff do not always help children to consolidate and extend their understanding of capacity. For example, staff do not encourage children to use mathematical words, such as 'full and empty' as they fill and tip water out of containers as part of their water play.
• Staff work closely with parents to help ensure they meet children's needs. They take time to get to know the children and their families. They find out about children's interests to help them provide opportunities that children will enjoy, and inform parents of their children's learning. Parents speak positively about the care and education their children receive. They say staff are friendly and approachable.
• Staff extend children's experiences from home to enhance their learning at the pre-school. For example, for children who live in flats or children who do not have gardens, staff provide opportunities for them to dig and explore in the nursery garden. To further extend this experience, staff encourage children to plant and grow vegetables and flowers, such as runner beans and sunflowers.
• Staff support children to behave well and learn about similarities and differences between themselves and others. Staff encourage children to talk about what makes them unique. For example, they talk about each other's differences, such as hair and eye colour or who they live with.
• Staff support children's growing independence. Two-year-old children learn to pour their own drinks at snack time and pre-school children take themselves to the bathroom. All children, including babies, learn to wash their own hands and four-year-old children know this is to remove germs.
• The manager supports staff through regular supervision meetings and discusses their training needs. This helps to ensure continuous improvements and a high-quality service for children and families. Staff in the baby room have recently attended a course on baby signing to help communicate better with babies.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• develop how staff support two-year-old children to maintain their concentration and become engaged in focus activities
• review the curriculum for mathematics to better support the development of pre-school children's understanding of capacity.