Spring - Layfield

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff provide a very warm and welcoming setting for children. All children are happy and settled. They form good relationships with staff and their peers. The key-person system is very effective, and all staff know the children in their care very well. This enables staff to plan an ambitious curriculum indoors and outdoors for each child. Staff also ensure that they adhere to babies' individual eating and sleeping patterns, which ensures that they settle quickly.

Children with special educational needs and/or disabilities are well supported. Staff work with other professionals to ensure that children receive additional help where needed. For example, they welcome speech and language therapists and physiotherapists into the setting and appreciate their professional guidance and ideas.

Staff are good role models and have high expectations of children's learning and behaviour. Staff consistently promote children's personal, social and emotional development during different activities and throughout the daily routine. For example, they gently and sensitively remind children about the rules in the setting, such as sharing and taking turns. Staff also encourage and praise children's good manners. As a result, children are well behaved and the environment is calm, friendly and happy.

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

• Staff are very skilled at including as many of the different areas of learning as possible into each activity to accelerate children's learning. For example, during a physical exercise activity, staff include positional language and spatial awareness, which supports children's early mathematical skills. They also introduce literacy and communication and language. Staff help children to learn about the effects that exercise, rest and drinking water have on their bodies and why they are important.
• Staff ensure that children have regular opportunities to learn about and understand the world around them. They arrange for visitors to come to the setting, such as nurses, police officers, and dental hygienists, which has helped to promote children's learning. Children receive healthy and nutritious meals and snacks. Staff encourage children to brush their teeth at the setting. Children thoroughly enjoy visits to an allotment and discuss the seeds they have planted and nurtured.
• Staff are very skilled at linking activities to extend and build on what children already know. For example, when outdoors, children show an interest in collecting leaves. Staff use children's interest to help them to identify similarities and differences and discuss size, shape, colour and shade.
• Children have a very good attitude to their learning. They are confident, busy and persevere well with tasks. For example, babies repeatedly scoop sand between two different-size spoons. This helps to promote their physical development, hand-eye coordination, and concentration skills. Older children laugh as they quickly try to make a ball shape from 'melting' gloop.
• Staff work well in partnership with parents and carers, other professionals, and the on-site school. They work closely with parents to support children's personal development. For example, staff offer advice and information for weaning and potty training.
• Staff provide parents with ideas about how to enhance their child's learning at home. For example, they provide recipe ideas, including for play dough, instructions on how to make musical instruments and carry out 'sound walks', and ideas for mathematics and literacy activities. However, the progress checks that they complete when children are aged between two and three years do not include information for parents about the activities and strategies they may adopt at home in order to address any gaps in their children's learning.
• Leadership and management are good. Leaders consider and support staff's well-being. Staff-to-child ratios are sometimes above minimum recommendations and are maintained at other times throughout the day, including at mealtimes. However, staff's lunch breaks sometimes coincide with children's eating times. This means that there are less staff to support children with their self-care skills and independence.
• Staff have a good attitude towards professional development. They complete various training courses, including forest school training and supporting children's speech and language.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• enhance the information that is shared with parents, for example, by including activities and strategies that parents may adopt at home in the progress check completed when children are aged between two and three years, in order to support any gaps in their child's learning
• consider the daily routine and staff breaks, for example, so that more staff are available to support children with their self-care skills and independence.