Ringwood Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children arrive at the setting with a big smile and an eagerness to learn. They separate from parents with ease and quickly engage in interesting activities. Children demonstrate that they feel safe and secure in the care of kind and respectful staff. Babies approach staff frequently, showing their toys and inviting staff into their play. Staff value children's nonverbal cues, voices and opinions as they gain consent from children before they engage in children's personal care.

Staff support children's early literacy skills well through a range of activities that reflect children's stage of learning. For example, babies demonstrate their growing love of books as they independently choose stories that interest them. They concentrate intently as they turn pages, lift flaps and babble at the pictures. Staff place a strong emphasis on books, attractively displaying a wide selection for children to choose from. Pre-school children have lots of opportunities to see text within their environment. Staff help older children make connections within their learning as they start to link letters and sounds. This helps prepare children well for future reading and writing.

Children start to gain a good understanding of their emotions. Pre-school children revisit a story about feelings. Staff encourage children to use the pictures and decide how the character might be feeling from their facial expressions. Children consider and share their own experiences of emotions as they reflect on prior events. This helps children develop their sense-of-self, as well as an understanding that others have feelings to. Children work collaboratively, as they decide to throw a festive party in the role-play area. Children replicate the behaviours they see from staff as they assign each other tasks and value each other's ideas.

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

• Leadership and management are effective. Staff have regular opportunities to enhance their skills through a range of professional development opportunities. This includes working alongside other professionals, such as teachers and therapists, to gain tips and good practice ideas that benefit the children in their care. Staff also work effectively with parents, providing them with regular updates on children's progress and by providing ideas on how they can support children's learning at home. Parents report that they are extremely happy with the progress their children make at the setting and the close bonds their children form with staff.
• Overall, children benefit from a curriculum that is broad, ambitious and effective in supporting all children to make good progress from their starting points. This includes children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. Staff know children very well and plan activities and experiences that are built on children's interests and what they need to learn next. However, in the toddler room, teaching is not always fully effective in delivering the learning intent of some activities to the highest standard. This means that some groups of children do not receive the same consistently high-quality learning opportunities as others.
• Staff promote children's physical development at every opportunity. Children thoroughly enjoy the time they spend in the well-planned outdoor environment. Children burn off steam and breathe fresh air as they run, climb and jump. Children demonstrate great skill and coordination as they operate ride-on toys and balance on logs. Staff provide lots of opportunities for children to develop their fine motor skills. For instance, staff provide interesting sensory bags that encourage toddlers to squeeze and manipulate. Pre-school children use thin paintbrushes to mix water colours and paint their creations. This helps provide children with the skills, strength and dexterity they will need for future writing.
• Children learn to be effective communicators. Staff support children's emerging speech well. They adapt their language to reflect children's differing stages of development and use aids, such as picture symbols and objects of reference, to help those who may need extra support. Staff working with babies pay close attention to their nonverbal cues and narrate what they are seeing. This helps to give babies a voice while they are developing their own. Babies demonstrate their confidence with newly acquired language as they practise new words in context, such as 'more', when wanting to hear another song.
• Staff support children's attitudes well. For example, staff help children prepare their bodies for focused learning. Staff gain children's attention and make sure they are sitting comfortably and have everything that they need. Children follow instructions as they put their 'big voices' in their pocket and turn on their 'listening ears'. Babies maintain impressive self-control as they sit together in a large group and listen intently to the stories being read. However, with toddlers, not all activities are as well thought out as others. For example, during mealtimes, the organisation of handwashing routines mean that toddlers have to wait unnecessarily before they are able to eat their food. As a result, some toddlers become restless and try to wonder off.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• make sure all staff have a secure understanding of what they want children to learn from planned activities and that teaching is effective at delivering the intended learning to the highest quality
• strengthen the organisation of some routines so that younger children do not have to wait unnecessarily before they are able to eat their meals.