Tummyticklers

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children arrive happily and eager to start their day. They are greeted by the caring, nurturing staff team, who welcome them into the nursery. Staff are quick to respond to children's needs. For instance, children who come into the nursery unsettled are quickly provided with cuddles and reassurance. This helps children to feel safe and secure. Staff provide a stimulating environment for children, indoors and outside. Children choose from a wide range of interesting activities. Older babies giggle with delight as they practise feeding the dolls porridge oats. Older children play together imaginatively, creating storylines. For example, they pretend to create a 'volcano house' and decide which dinosaurs can enter.

Children behave extremely well. Staff praise children for using good manners, sharing and taking turns. This helps children to understand what behaviour is expected and promotes their confidence and self-esteem. Staff encourage children to complete tasks for themselves. For instance, toddlers wash their hands, cut up their snack and serve themselves lunch. This helps to develop their self-care skills and independence. Staff provide children with plenty of time outside in the garden. They teach them how to manage risks, such as when they climb up and down the climbing frame. This helps children to develop their large muscles, balance and coordination.

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

• Children develop a love of books and reading. Babies sit cuddled up with staff to listen as they read their favourite stories with enthusiasm. Older children select their favourite stories and look at them independently. Furthermore, staff have developed a lending library, to encourage parents to share books at home. This helps to develop children's early literacy skills.
• Staff support children's communication and language skills well. Toddlers enjoy singing familiar songs and rhymes, and quickly learn and join in with repetitive phrases. Staff enthusiastically engage older children in conversations and support them to hear new vocabulary. Staff ask children age-appropriate questions and narrate as children play. This helps to extend children's vocabulary.
• Children develop a secure understanding of numbers, counting and size through some planned learning opportunities. For example, they count and measure ingredients as they make biscuits. Staff play alongside children and introduce mathematical language, such as 'bigger' and 'smaller', as they pick strawberries from the allotment. This helps to develop children's early mathematical skills.
• Staff have high expectations of children's behaviour and support them well. They use effective strategies to help children to manage their own feelings and behaviours. For instance, staff explain why rules are in place, such as when using safety equipment.
• Overall, there is an ambitious curriculum in place. Staff have a good knowledge of children's individual needs and interests. Staff use observations and assessments and plan exciting and interesting activities. They demonstrate a good level of teaching. However, occasionally, staff do not recognise opportunities to extend and challenge children's learning even further.
• Leaders ensure that children with special educational needs and/or disabilities are supported effectively to make good progress. Staff are quick to identify children who are not at their expected levels of development. They make swift referrals and consistently work in partnership with other professionals to develop targeted plans for all children who need them. This helps these children to make the best possible progress.
• Partnerships with parents are a real strength of the setting. They are involved and informed about their children's learning. Staff provide ideas and suggestions to parents about how they can support children's learning at home. They gather detailed information from parents about what children know and can do when they first start at the setting. However, staff do not use this information to plan effectively for children's learning from the very beginning. That said, parents cannot speak highly enough about the nurturing staff and how well they accommodate children's individual needs.
• Leaders use supervision meetings to talk about staff's well-being and identify training that is specific to individual staff's needs. They recognise the importance of staff's well-being and keeping professional development up to date. Staff comment on the strong relationships and how they feel well supported by the leadership team.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support staff to focus more closely on all of the available opportunities within activities to challenge and extend children's learning even further
• use the initial information gathered from parents to plan for children's learning effectively from the very beginning.