Partou Whalley Meadows Day Nursery & Forest School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children benefit from an abundance of outdoor learning opportunities. They learn how to climb and balance over beams and do so with skill and determination because of the helpful guidance that staff provide. A favourite area for children to play is the sand shed. Children cooperate well with their friends as they work together to make sand castles and dig tunnels and holes. They develop their large muscles and enhance their social skills. Children take part in many outings around the local community that leaders carefully plan. Children visit a local forest area and library and attend swimming lessons each week. This helps to provide children with a well-rounded curriculum and supports their overall skills and development.

Staff are nurturing and speak to children with kindness and respect. For example, they consult with children before helping them with care routines, such as wiping their noses and changing nappies. Children are extremely confident, settled and self-assured. Young children celebrate their own achievements. For example, as they build small towers with bricks, they lift their arms and beam with pride saying, 'did it'. Staff cheer and offer praise, which helps to keep children motivated to learn. Older children are kind, friendly and understand the rules of the setting. They help to tidy away resources, set the tables for meals and line up for headcounts when going inside from the garden. Children are self-motivated, and their behaviour is good in relation to their age.

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

• Leaders make certain that staff have a good understanding of child development. Staff check children's learning accurately. This helps them to plan for what children need to learn next effectively. For example, staff understand the importance of offering babies time to play on their tummies to help to build up their core muscles in readiness for sitting, crawling and walking. Children make good progress.
• Staff ably support children's language development. They share high-quality books, such as those with images of sheep and lambs. Children show a keen interest in learning new words. They explore animals and are inquisitive about the name of a baby sheep. This broadens children's understanding and increases their vocabulary.
• Leaders' support for staff is effective. They provide supervision sessions and ensure that staffs' well-being is considered well. However, at times, leaders do not identify inconsistencies in the practice of some staff. This means that, at times, some staff teach the curriculum with more success than others.
• Leaders ensure that staff access regular training opportunities. A recent focus has been safeguarding training, including whistle-blowing procedures. Staff are confident in recognising if a child may be at risk or how to recognise inappropriate behaviour from a colleague, including the procedures to follow. This helps to keep children safe.
• Staff teach children essential skills in readiness for future learning. For example, staff help older children to recognise their name in print and the sounds that letters make. Children learn about making marks with various tools, such as pencils, chalks and paints. They show good control when holding pencils. This helps them to develop early writing skills.
• Children's good health is well supported by staff. Leaders provide a varied and nutritious diet at mealtimes. Children are curious about and eager to taste new foods, such as spring onions. They brush their teeth at the setting and are competent in washing their hands. This helps children to develop healthy habits.
• Leaders place great emphasis on ensuring that children's emotional needs are met. They provide very well-considered settling-in sessions from when children start at the nursery. This is mirrored as children move rooms. Children know the routines well because of the careful guidance from staff. This supports children to feel reassured and secure.
• Staff support children skilfully to understand what makes them unique. For example, they use mirrors to talk about their features before painting a self-portrait. Staff ask children to explore their eye and hair colour as they paint. This helps children to understand what makes them special and contributes to their understanding of the differences and similarities between themselves and others.
• Staff form good relationships with parents and carers. They keep parents well-informed about their children's learning and gather information from home about children's interests. This helps staff to plan meaningful learning opportunities to extend children's learning. However, less emphasis is placed on providing parents with advice and support to enhance children's learning at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• sharpen the monitoring and evaluating of staff practice to help to identify any inconsistencies and raise the already good levels of practice even higher
• provide parents with support to help them to further extend children's learning at home.