West Lodge Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff care for the children attentively, supporting their emotional well-being. Children seek out staff for reassurance when needed. Staff offer warm hugs and speak softly to all children. They sing as they rock the youngest babies to sleep. Children have strong relationships with staff and feel safe and secure at the nursery.

Children are eager to explore and they develop a real thirst for learning. Staff provide good opportunities to support children's development. Children roll balls over ramps and through tunnels, curiously rushing to see where they have gone. Children develop their large-muscle skills. For example, they paint the fence in the garden, using water and brushes. They competently climb steps and manoeuvre around furniture. Older children benefit from forest school sessions, where staff challenge children to take risks and explore their capabilities while climbing up and down the 'mud slide'. Children enjoy sitting together as they sing songs and enjoy hot chocolate. This enhances their social skills.

Children throughout the nursery show a love of rhymes, books and stories. Younger children enjoy choosing songs to sing together. They learn about rhythm and tone as they sing 'quietly' and 'loudly'. Older children listen with interest to stories and talk about the characters they see. They enhance their literacy skills as they re-enact familiar stories as they play. For example, they use a familiar phrase from a story as they mix potions outside in the mud kitchen. They use a sweeping brush as a 'broomstick' and pretend to fly to the dragon.

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

• Staff plan experiences to help enrich children's lives and broaden their knowledge and understanding of the wider world. For example, children have ample opportunities to visit the on-site farm park, to help care for the animals. Furthermore, they grow and harvest their own fruit and vegetables and watch the tractor in action. Children take part in activities to mark a range of multicultural festivals throughout the year. This helps children to respect other cultures while embracing their own.
• Overall, children's behaviour is good. They understand the expectations of their behaviour from the set rules and boundaries that are in place. However, during daily transitions, staff do not always consistently interact with children and plan how they deploy themselves effectively. For example, on occasion, they are preoccupied with other tasks, such as tidying up resources and getting ready for mealtimes. As a result, some children forget the rules, run around and the noise levels rise.
• The newly formed leadership team are reflective and want to continually develop in the nursery. One of the improvements has been to enhance children's communication and language through developing high-quality interactions between staff and children. Staff provide a commentary for children's play and engage in conversations with them. They allow plenty of time for children to think creatively and answer questions to build on their emerging skills. However, staff have not yet considered how to introduce and reinforce the use of new words to extend children's vocabulary further. Some words that staff use in conversation with the children are basic for the children's age and stage of development.
• The nursery menu has been carefully considered to reduce sugar content and use home grown produce. This contributes to children being offered healthy and nutritious meals to promote their good health.
• All staff show a commitment and passion in raising the standards for children's learning and care. Robust staff supervision and practice monitoring arrangements help develop staff's knowledge and skills. Together, leaders and staff implement an ambitious curriculum that captures children's curiosity and focuses on what they need to learn next. This helps all children make good progress from their starting points.
• Leaders are knowledgeable about supporting children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). They work closely with other agencies to make sure that children get the appropriate support. Staff provide children with targeted help to enable them to make good progress in their learning. Any additional funding is used well to support learning.
• Parents comment that they feel involved and well informed about their children's learning. They value the settling-in procedures of the nursery and report that their children settle quickly and feel secure. Parents particularly like the online app, which provides them with suggestions to support children's learning at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• strengthen staff deployment further to support daily routine transitions and enable children to remain highly focused
• support staff to introduce and use new words to increase children's vocabulary and enhance their communication and language skills.