Rainbow Bright Day Care

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children enjoy their time in this friendly nursery. Upon arrival, children are welcomed with a smile from the genuinely caring staff who know them well. Staff have high regard for helping new babies settle smoothly. Babies begin to feel safe and secure as staff respond calmly and attentively to their individual needs. Children snuggle into staff for comfort and reassurance, demonstrating the swift and trusting bonds they are making with them.

Staff provide plenty of focused activities to ensure children develop the skills necessary to be ready for school. Staff talk about first aid, during fun experiences such as practising putting on plasters. This helps children become more risk aware and gives them more confidence to practise basic care and help others.

Children are gently reminded to share, take turns, and think about their peers. Children use sand timers as a visual reminder of waiting for their turn on the pedal bikes. Staff encourage children to problem solve and explore their own ideas. When children need more sand in their dinosaur game, staff ask them how they could fix this. Children decide to collect more sand in a bucket. They discover the benefits of teamwork while successfully carrying it together before emptying it into the tray.

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

• Staff ensure that their own speaking enables children to hear and develop good language skills. Staff respond enthusiastically to babies' babbles by modelling and repeating single words, which encourages them to say their first words. When older children retell a familiar story, staff emphasise key words and introduce pictures and props, to ensure all children, including those with English as an additional language, learn new vocabulary and connect meanings to these words.
• Staff consider children's interests, regular assessments of their progress and parental views, to plan meaningful teaching experiences that support their next steps in learning. For example, children practise using tweezers to pick up animal figurines. They are strengthening muscles in their fingers that support their early writing skills, enthused by their love of animals. However, staff do not self-evaluate their teaching enough, to ensure they continuously provide purposeful and challenging learning experiences.
• All environments are inviting, well-resourced and cover all areas of learning. Outdoors, babies enjoy the freedom to crawl and pull themselves up on appropriate equipment, developing their core muscles and balancing skills needed to take their first steps. Children enjoy reading books outdoors. They test their physical limits, trialling out different ways to lift small rubber tyres on and off wooden poles.
• Children demonstrate their independence and good hygiene habits when carrying out daily, self-care routines, such as hand washing. Staff diligently assist and praise children's efforts as they learn to use a knife safely when preparing their own snack. Occasionally, at times of transition, such as going outdoors to play, staff do not establish a clear routine so all children can become increasingly confident to prepare themselves for what's happening next
• Children are well behaved and listen to each other's thoughts and opinions. They copy these positive and respectful behaviours from staff, who model them consistently well. As a result, those children who find it difficult to share are beginning to accept the needs of others when sharing toys independently.
• Sometimes, the management team does not ensure communication with staff is cohesive. For example, when recently implementing changes to the pre-school room, some staff were not informed sufficiently, to effectively plan purposeful learning experiences from the start. Despite this, the management team is passionate about consistently improving the quality of care and education to all children and their families. Their active presence in the daily running of the nursery and good modelling of teaching reflects this.
• Parents report very good, daily communication that is always an honest reflection of their child's day. Parents applaud the collaborative working with outside professionals, such as speech and language therapists. Parents, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, express they know how to support their child's ongoing development at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• focus more closely on supporting staff to strengthen their reflective practice to improve on their existing good teaching
• review routines throughout the nursery to increase staff's focus on supporting all children in their learning, particularly at times of transition
• consider collaborative working with staff more closely when implementing changes to environments to minimise disruption in children's purposeful play.