Small Wonders Children's Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children form strong relationships with staff from the beginning of their time at the nursery. Children are happy and settle in well. Staff implement highly effective key-person systems to ensure they get to know each child as individuals as well as their families. Staff work closely with parents to gather information about children's lives outside of the nursery, and they use the information they gather to provide a very good continuity of care for children.

Children benefit from regular outings to a wide variety of places in the local area. For example, they visit beaches where they conduct beach cleans, and visit polling stations where they learn about democracy. This helps children to learn about the world around them and teaches them good values. Staff and leaders implement a well-planned curriculum that reflects children's interests and individual needs. Staff support children's learning very well, ensuring the activities and experiences on offer inspire children. Children are motivated in their learning; they thoroughly enjoy getting involved in the range of exciting and interesting things staff plan for them, both indoors and outdoors.

Staff ensure they are good role models of positive behaviour. They have clear expectations for children. Children behave well and fully understand the nursery boundaries. Children get on well with others and they learn positive social skills during their time at the nursery. Staff celebrate children's achievements which helps boost their self-esteem.

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

• Staff use their knowledge of individual children to assess what they know and can do to inform their teaching and the curriculum. They extend children's interests well and adapt the curriculum to ensure that all children can access what is on offer. This helps all children make consistently good progress in all areas of their development, including those children who have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).
• Staff ensure that environments are stimulating and attractive to children. Environments are set out in a way that allows children to have freedom to explore and make their own choices in play. For example, babies can cruise around low-level furniture and access table-top activities, toddlers have space to engage in active large movement play and children who prefer to learn outdoors have vast opportunities to play in the garden, including engaging in forest-school activities.
• Staff use a range of strategies to help all children to communicate. For example, staff working with SEND children use sign language and visual aids alongside spoken language to help them understand and communicate their needs. Overall staff promote children's communication and language skills well. However, on occasion staff working with the youngest children use too much questioning and little narrative to describe what children are doing to help extend their vocabulary and conversations.
• Staff promote children's independence well. Children learn good self-care from a young age. This is as a result of staff taking opportunities as they arise to teach children specific skills. Staff encourage children to do things for themselves before asking for help.
• Staff promote literacy in a variety of ways. For example, children learn to recognise their name in print and enjoy practising letter sounds in words during story sessions. However, staff have not had up to date training on how to teach children the correct pronunciation of letter sounds, and do not always model the correct pronunciation. As a result, children do not learn these correctly in readiness for starting school.
• Leaders are dedicated and driven to providing high-quality care and education for children. They offer regular and supportive supervision to staff that is tailored to the needs of the individual. Staff morale is high, and staff value the good professional development opportunities leaders make available to them.
• Leaders regularly self-evaluate and have a good understanding of what is working well and what they could enhance further. This helps develop staff skills and continually helps raise the quality of the already good teaching skills.
• Parents are complementary about the care and education their children receive. Staff help ensure parents gain a good understanding of their child's time at the nursery. They regularly update parents on their child's progress and work collaboratively with them to share tips and ideas for things they can do to support their child's development at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• enhance the narrative alongside the youngest children's play to help extend conversations and build on children's language development more effectively
• strengthen the knowledge of staff when teaching literacy skills to older children so that staff deliver a consistently high-quality curriculum for literacy.