Sheringham Nursery School & Children’s Centre

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Outcome

Sheringham Nursery School & Children's Centre continues to be an outstanding school.

What is it like to attend this school?

The children and their families are at the heart of this school.

Children confidently welcome visitors and invite them to share a book or join in their activities. Families value the wealth of support and advice that is provided. This helps them and their children to overcome barriers so that children can thrive.

Everyone is incredibly proud to be part of the Sheringham Nursery School community.

High expectations permeate throughout the school. There are no limits placed on what children can achieve, including for the high proportion of child...ren from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Children engage in a multitude of exciting activities with a sense of purpose and determination. They are curious, inquisitive and keen to learn. Children relish the ambitious opportunities available to them.

For example, staff support children in using knives and food cutters to prepare and eat their own snacks. At the woodwork bench, children independently access and use hammers and nails to create their own models.

Relationships between children and their key person are strong.

Children are kept safe and trust the adults around them. Adults are positive role models. They expertly support children's social and emotional development through helping children to express themselves, listen to others, and ultimately understand their emotions and those of others.

This helps children to get better at managing for themselves how they behave and react in different situations.

Children leave this provision very well prepared for the next stages of their education.

What does the school do well and what does it need to do better?

The curriculum and wider offer at this school are carefully thought through and based on extensive, credible educational research.

Staff ensure that every aspect of the curriculum is intentional and interwoven. Leaders have set 'curricular goals' that identify the outcomes that they want children to achieve. The small chunks of learning needed to achieve these have also been clearly set out.

As a result, children develop deep knowledge and skills across all areas of learning. This includes children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The school prioritises the development of children's language and communication.

It is the bedrock of the whole curriculum, teaching and provision. Staff have a deep understanding of how young children learn. They ensure that interactions with children are of high quality and contribute to children's development.

Staff expertly model and continually develop children's vocabulary with the aim of reaching a continual back-and-forth conversation. Children's language is further developed through explicit teaching sessions that promote talking and use stories to support children's mathematical understanding, for example. The curriculum also identifies and maps out essential books and rhymes so that children experience a range of high-quality texts and language.

Children are surrounded by stories and books, which they thoroughly enjoy being immersed in. They know that at any point, they can request a story to be read to them, and an adult will facilitate this.

The school has a highly inclusive ethos.

Leaders and staff are equally ambitious for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). Children with SEND are well supported by expert staff who 'scaffold up'. This means that children with SEND play and learn alongside their peers, accessing the same high-quality provision and opportunities.

The close working relationship with the children's centre enables additional needs to be identified, often before children join the nursery. The school works closely with families to quickly put support in place, involving external agencies and specialists where needed.

The provision for children's personal development flows through all aspects of nursery life.

Every activity and interaction skilfully develop children's wider development and understanding. This is clear, for example, in how staff promote children's independence, the relationships children build with the adults and each other and how children learn to understand their feelings and emotions. Children are taught and shown by the adults around them to value and appreciate diversity and difference.

Promoting children's wider development also goes beyond the nursery setting. For instance, the 'bike project' enables families to continue to support their children's physical development outside of school, reinforcing the many benefits that children can gain from riding a bike. Children and their families experience a range of educational visits, including visits to different places of worship, the local park and the seaside.

The governing body, leaders and staff are relentless in their drive to continually improve. Leaders reflect on their research work and the support that they give to other schools. They ensure that their work directly benefits the children and families here.

Leaders prioritise staff professional development and, through this, ensure that all staff are highly trained and experts in what they do.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.

Background

When we have judged a school to be outstanding, we will then normally go into the school about once every four years to confirm that the school remains outstanding.

This is called an ungraded inspection, and it is carried out under section 8 of the Education Act 2005. We do not give graded judgements on an ungraded inspection. However, if we find evidence that a school would now receive a higher or lower grade, then the next inspection will be a graded inspection, which is carried out under section 5 of the Act.

Usually this is within one to two years of the date of the ungraded inspection. If we have serious concerns about safeguarding, behaviour or the quality of education, we will deem the ungraded inspection a graded inspection immediately.

This is the second ungraded inspection since we judged the school to be outstanding in June 2014.

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