The Village Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff know children and their families extremely well. They focus strongly on meeting children's care needs, consistently supporting their personal and emotional development. For example, when children arrive, staff greet them individually and provide the support they need to settle happily into their play.

Overall, staff provide children with an ambitious curriculum, indoors and outdoors. Staff use their good knowledge of children's individual needs and development to provide learning experiences to help them to make good progress. All children including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), are active, motivated learners who thoroughly enjoy being at the nursery.

Staff have clear expectations for children's behaviour. They support them well to understand and manage their emotions and to develop good confidence, social skills and friendships.

Staff provide a wide range of activities that develop children's understanding of the world. For example, they take children on local outings to a farm, church, allotments and to paddle in a stream. Staff also encourage children to listen to and talk about sounds they hear outdoors, such as helicopters and wildlife flying over the nursery. Children thoroughly enjoy learning to grow tomatoes and pumpkins in an old tractor tyre.

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

• The manager supports staff and apprentices well to understand their roles and responsibilities and gain childcare qualifications. Apprentices work effectively with staff to provide additional support for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• Staff support children well, including those with English as an additional language, to develop and use a wide range of vocabulary. They skilfully engage in children's play, asking interesting questions that inspire children to respond and talk. For instance, when children see diggers near to the nursery, staff engage them in conversation to support their language development. Staff also successfully promote children's interest in books, talking and explaining words related to the pictures, such as wombat.
• Although staff communicate and interact with children well, they do not consistently challenge children's learning in all areas of the curriculum, including their mathematical development. As a result, there are times when some children, including those with SEND are not supported to make even better progress.
• Despite some weaknesses in the implementation of the curriculum, children develop the skills they need for future learning. They learn to concentrate during activities, for example, while listening to stories. Children develop good independence. For example, staff teach them to put on their coats and waterproof boots, find their own water bottles, and carry their packed lunch boxes to the table.
• Staff support children's physical development well. Children smile and laugh as staff show them how to move in different ways such as, crouching and waving their arms during a parachute game. Children develop good hand-eye coordination, for example, as they build constructions using small bricks and learn to use large tweezers to pick up dried pasta. Children confidently practice and talk about yoga movements they have previously learned while using low level balancing beams.
• Staff introduce initiatives that successfully help children learn to share the resources. For example, they teach children to use sand timers, which enable them to understand how long they need to wait for their turn. Children learn to be kind and considerate to others.
• Staff work well in partnership with parents to support children and provide advice that benefits the whole family. However, occasionally, when there are emerging concerns about children's development, staff do not always respond in a timely way to seek parent's consent for intervention from other agencies.
• The manager uses additional funding well to widen children's experiences and support their development overall. For example, if children do not have access to the outdoors at home, she obtains protective clothing that enables them to play comfortably outdoors in all weather and develop their physical skills.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support children to build on their emerging ideas during activities to further challenge and continually enhance their learning in all areas of the curriculum
• strengthen staff's skills in recognising and responding to opportunities to support children's mathematical development further
• strengthen communication with parents about emerging gaps in their child's development so any additional intervention can be sought swiftly.