Stars Day Nurseries Ltd t/a Bright Stars Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

All children receive an exemplary standard of care and education. They wholeheartedly benefit from such warm and loving interactions with the staff who care for them. This supports their emotional and personal development superbly.

All children become deeply involved in the wealth of exciting activities on offer to them in both the indoor and outdoor environments. Where children play, there is a wonderful atmosphere of fun and delight. Children's behaviour is excellent. They consistently interact very well with each other and have high regard for others. For example, one helps another to open the lid on their bottle saying, 'it goes like this, you turn it like that'.

Toddlers are adventurous and enthusiastically encouraged by staff to challenge their physical abilities, for example walking across pallets and through tyres of varying sizes. They create their own games and are excellently supported by staff to develop their ideas.

Children's communication and language development is excellently supported by all staff. Staff repeat sounds babies are beginning to make to encourage early communication. All children learn so much from the monthly core stories in each room. For example, older children learn how to bring the story about going on a bear hunt to life in the forest school area. This encourages the acquisition of wonderful new vocabulary, such as 'squelchy' and squirchy' when they stomp through the mud.

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

• The leadership and management of this nursery is worthy of dissemination to others. All staff, managers, senior managers, and directors have the same vision: to provide only the very best early years experience for each child and their family. Staff work tirelessly to successfully achieve this. They also go above and beyond to support disadvantaged families across Peterborough, all year round.
• All children make rapid progress and significantly benefit from attendance at this nursery. They develop a wealth of independence skills, and accumulate these as they progress through the rooms, so that by the time they leave for school, they have a secure and very strong foundation for their future learning.
• In all rooms of the nursery, staff's interactions with children are of the highest quality. These contribute excellently to delivering the curriculum content according to every child's needs and preferred learning style. Staff make full use of every learning opportunity to extend children's knowledge and skills. When older children show a little reluctance to mix water and mud with their hands, the forest school leader expertly decides to show them the mud handprint he has made on a nearby wooden pallet. With much renewed enthusiasm, all children eagerly mix the mud mixture themselves, so that they can add their handprint to the gallery.
• Partnerships with parents are superb. For example, parent feedback states, 'The general communication between parents and staff is exemplary.' Staff go above and beyond to ensure parents have a wealth of information about their child's day, learning and progress.
• Staff give children a rich set of experiences that promote an understanding of, and respect for, people, families and communities beyond their own. Older children send and receive letters from other children around the country and the local care home. Parents help staff to share children's home languages, for example, by making recordings or writing out simple recipes.
• Children who speak English as an additional language, those with special educational needs and/or disabilities and children in receipt of additional funding are exceptionally well supported. They make significant progress from their individual starting points because staff understand that early intervention supports better outcomes for children.
• Without exception, staff are eager to share their extremely high levels of enthusiasm for their role and demonstrate this in all that they do. They speak extremely highly of the manager and all that she does to support and promote her belief in them. This results in an extremely low staff turnover and many have been at the nursery for a significant number of years. The children benefit hugely from a company prepared to invest so much in the well-being and professional development of their staff.
• Forest school activities are hugely beneficial to the children's education and well-being. Children have plentiful opportunities to work collaboratively, explore nature, take and talk about risks, challenge themselves, develop their imagination and construct using natural materials.
• Feedback from parents is overwhelmingly positive. Unanimously, they make comment about the 'absolutely amazing' nursery. They say that staff 'show genuine concern and compassion for the children and their families' and that the nursery is run with 'lots of passion and heart, where everybody is thriving'.