Ashbourne Day Nurseries At Hedgeland

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The provision is good

Children happily play and explore in the nursery. They confidently look inside baskets to find the equipment they want to use during their imaginary games and experiments.

This helps them to develop their creativity. Empty tables and play spaces allow children to move equipment around, encouraging them to stretch their understanding in a location and at a pace that suits them. Children's physical development is supported while they carry objects and negotiate around furniture and other children.

Staff embrace children's curiosities. They add small challenges and give different ideas to help children build on what they ...already know. For example, children use scissors to cut fresh flowers.

They feel and smell the petals before deciding to use the flower heads as paint brushes. Staff encourage children to talk about what they are doing, offering more descriptive words to help build on children's vocabularies.Babies enjoy playing peekaboo games with the receptive and nurturing staff.

Babies pop their heads above a low-shelf unit and smile when staff respond with expressions of surprise, promoting repetition and delight. This helps strengthen early communication skills. When they are tired, babies snuggle up and are cradled by the caring staff.

Babies are comforted by familiar objects from home, such as a special blanket or soft toy. This helps them to feel secure and settled right from their early days in the nursery.

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

Managers and staff welcome the advice and guidance they receive from support agencies and other professionals working with children.

This helps staff to provide good-quality care and education to all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities.Children begin to learn how to keep themselves and others safe. They take turns to help staff check the garden before they announce to their friends that it is safe to play outside.

They look to see if the gate is locked and that toys and equipment are not broken. This helps children to develop a sense of responsibility and an awareness of potential hazards.All staff, including managers, are effectively supported and supervised in their roles.

They are given opportunities to build on their own knowledge and understanding through a variety of training courses and visits to other nurseries within the chain. This helps them to bring new and exciting ideas to the nursery, helping to support children's learning even more.Children who speak English as an additional language are effectively supported according to their individual needs.

Parents are involved with decisions to help make children's transitions into the nursery as smooth as possible. For example, some parents like staff to use visual cues to help children understand, while other parents write down key words for staff to use.Staff find interesting ways to build on what children already know.

For example, following reading a story about colours and emotions, children mix different colours together. They watch what happens to sand as it soaks up the liquid. Staff check to find out what children remember from the story, helping them to extend children's understanding at a suitable pace.

Staff effectively use their judgement to help assess when to step back, allowing children who are deeply absorbed in their experiments and explorations to continue without interruption. This helps children to benefit from time and space to consolidate what they already know before they try something new.Children are well behaved.

They respond positively to requests and explanations that staff give them, helping them to understand what is expected of them. Children are motivated to learn and discover. They quickly build trusting relationships to their key person and other staff, asking questions and proudly showing them what they have been doing.

Children enjoy quiet times to listen to stories. However, sometimes, they are distracted by other children enjoying more lively activities in close proximity to them. This impacts on their ability to concentrate and learn.

The enthusiastic staff ask children questions about what they are doing. However, they do not always give children enough time to think through their answers before they offer their own solutions and predictions. This means that children do not use their own thinking skills as much as they could.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.The owners ensure that robust policies and procedures are in place, helping all managers and staff to clearly understand their roles and responsibilities to keep children safe. Staff regularly update and refresh their knowledge and understanding about safeguarding, including wider issues, such as extreme beliefs.

Staff confidently know how to report concerns they might have about children's well-being. This helps to ensure that children are kept safe from harm.

What does the setting need to do to improve?

To further improve the quality of the early years provision, the provider should: review when and where children access quieter activities and opportunities so that they are less likely to be distracted and interrupted by other groups of children; this particularly relates to story times and talking and listening activities nimprove staff's understanding of questioning techniques to allow children time to solve problems and predict outcomes, and help strengthen their thinking skills.