Treetops 2A The Grove

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy and enjoy their time at this welcoming and nurturing nursery. They build positive relationships with staff. Children are keen to take part in a range of interesting and challenging activities, which are carefully planned to enable sequenced learning of the curriculum. They welcome praise and recognition for their choices, which helps to raise their self-esteem. For instance, children choose to engage in sensory learning with flour, making faces that show varying emotions.

During group times, children learn about emotions. They express how they are feeling and the reasons for this. Children confidently describe their feelings and relate these to the book on emotions they are reading. This also helps them to learn and understand the feelings of their peers. For example, they carefully sing songs with staff about sharing and caring to remind themselves to be kind to friends.

Children enjoy developing their physical skills and playing outdoors. For example, they enthusiastically balance on challenging combinations of apparatus, tackling the different slants of planks. Children develop their fine motor skills. They focus well on threading strings and connecting small parts during various activities.

Children develop their independence very well. For example, children help to tidy up when they have finished playing and develop skills in putting on jackets.

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

• Staff recognise the importance for children to hear more words to improve their language and communication skills. Staff read books with great expression. Children enthusiastically join in with repeated rhyming phrases. They answer questions about the story to show that they understand what has happened. This helps children to build their vocabulary and make progress in their language development.
• Staff interact with children very well. They consider what children can do and what they should learn next. Staff think about the best ways to set out the resources and activities to promote children's interest and engagement. For example, children are excited as they care for dolls in the role-play area. They show strong engagement as they care for the hygiene of the dolls. However, staff provide fewer opportunities for children to develop their thinking and communication skills, such as when children talk about dinosaurs outdoors.
• Staff closely observe children and monitor their progress effectively. They then plan, with the manager, how to help children achieve the next steps of learning. However, recent staff changes have meant that some staff new to their role are not fully aware of children's starting points, to support their learning even further.
• There are very good links with other professionals who provide specialist support. For example, staff keenly use the additional strategies provided by speech and language therapists. This provides children with special educational needs and/or disabilities with many opportunities to develop their communication skills. Leaders ensure that children receive any funding they are entitled to and think carefully about how to use this funding to support children's needs.
• Children who speak English as an additional language receive excellent support to settle in. They respond happily to staff's smiles and show that they feel confident to share thoughts with other children in their home language.
• Staff warmly welcome children at the start and end of their nursery day. Staff find out what they would like to do and provide a very good range of activities. Children are encouraged to get involved in things that fascinate them. For example, they enjoy observing and discussing a caterpillar they find on a leaf. There is laughter as children tell staff about what it likes to eat from a previous reading of 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'.
• The new staff team works collaboratively and communicates respectfully as a team. The leaders have introduced effective systems of supervision and training to support staff. Staff are offered training based on their needs and requests. This has led to the new team working towards effective outcomes for children.
• There are effective partnerships with parents. Staff communicate well with parents, both verbally and via an app. Parents feel welcomed and involved in their child's learning. They speak highly about how their children are very well prepared for starting school.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• give children opportunities to extend their thinking as they engage in play so that their quality of education is improved
• enable new staff to develop their understanding of children's prior learning, to ensure their progress is consistently supported.