The Greenhouse Project

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children, including those with special educational needs (SEND), flourish in their learning and development while attending the nursery. This is because staff expect all children to succeed. Children's eagerness and curiosity are valued by staff who build carefully on children's needs, interests and abilities. The children gain much new knowledge from the well-considered learning activities that staff provide. For instance, children learn to care for living creatures, such as the nursery's giant African snail. They also learn to avoid standing on other snails in the nursery garden.

Children, including the high percentage who speak English as an additional language, become confident to play and talk with others. They learn valuable new words in English, such as 'toilet' and 'wash hands'. This helps children to communicate successfully with staff, who talk with them often, guiding them effectively in their learning. Staff ensure that children's learning and personal care needs are successfully met.

Children are happy at nursery. They make friends easily and settle quickly in their play and activities. Children know how to behave, for example to keep their hands to themselves, because staff skilfully help them to know how to act and why. Children cheer joyfully when staff celebrate with them any 'acts of kindness' by other children.

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

• The well-trained manager and staff team have established a carefully thought-out curriculum for all children, including those with SEND and children who speak English as an additional language. The manager and staff identify the important information they want children to learn. The special educational needs coordinator (SENCo) ensures that staff use expert advice, such as from educational psychologists, to adapt their support for children. All children have the chance to experience success.
• Staff carefully organise activities to match the nursery's curriculum, including by building on children's interests. They ensure that children practise their new learning through worthwhile play opportunities. Sometimes however, staff do not use their assessment information well enough to identify when to build on children's existing knowledge. Children do not develop their ideas and understanding of concepts as well as possible.
• Staff help children to understand counting order and how many objects they can see. For example, children delight in watching currant buns reduce in number as they pretend to eat them. Children learn the meaning of numbers well.
• Most of the time, staff use their expert understanding to teach all children new words. For example, they skilfully explain words such as 'mixing' and 'change', when children combine different-coloured water outdoors. However, on occasion, staff use language imprecisely. The do not make consistently good use of words as labels. This limits children's understanding and use of their growing vocabulary.
• Staff ably and regularly read well-chosen books to children. They use pauses in their storytelling in a skilful and dramatic way. Staff prompt children to recall what they already know as well as to predict what might happen next. They securely develop children's knowledge of stories, characters, book language and structure. Children find story times at the nursery irresistible, and they want to hear even more.
• The manager thoughtfully provides training and support for staff that helps them to improve the curriculum and their teaching. Parents and carers said that they receive valuable information about their children's education at nursery, which helps them to support learning at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• refine the curriculum and staff's use of assessment, so that their teaching builds fully on children's existing knowledge and deepens their learning
• develop staff's ability to use language more precisely when speaking with children, to help consistently support children's understanding and use of their growing vocabulary.