The Lawns Nursery School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Outcome

The Lawns Nursery School continues to be an outstanding school.

What is it like to attend this school?

Children thrive in this welcoming and inclusive nursery.

As one parent commented, 'The school lays great foundations for education by instilling a love for learning, creativity and reading.' Sessions begin and end with familiar routines. This makes for a happy and settled nursery community.

When children come in, they enjoy deciding which area to play in or choosing a book and relaxing on a beanbag to read peacefully. Before going home, children practise their yoga poses and sing well-known songs.

As children explore the indoor and outdoor areas, adults make the ...most of opportunities to help them consider what is safe and what is unsafe.

Consequently, children are confident about how to look after themselves while playing independently, for example on the outdoor climbing frames or when using resources in the creative area.

Children achieve exceptionally well because of the ambitious curriculum leaders have developed. Staff know in detail what children must learn and take every opportunity to explain new vocabulary.

The environment is bursting with inviting activities based on children's interests. Adults skilfully turn everything into an opportunity to learn the well-planned curriculum. Children are never far away from a book that adults share, skilfully making links to the curriculum and deepening children's learning at every opportunity.

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

The school sets highly ambitious goals for what children will learn before they leave the nursery. The precise and thoughtful way in which the curriculum is designed enables children's learning to build securely. For example, in physical development, children strengthen their muscles through yoga and by moving with ribbons and streamers.

They have many opportunities to climb, jump, throw and catch in the school's well-developed outside area. Adults support children very well with developing their physical skills, such as through modelling and suggesting ways to use tools such as hammers in woodwork. They actively encourage children to challenge themselves and take risks on the larger equipment, inspiring them to practise so that they become physically confident.

Engaging activities, such as writing with large chalks and pens on giant paper on the floor, are planned deliberately. These prepare children well for developing finer motor skills, which they later strengthen as they use an increasingly more complex range of tools and resources. As a result of this deliberate approach to their development, children make excellent progress from their starting points in this and other aspects of the early years curriculum.

Consequently, they are very well prepared for their key stage 1 learning.

Leaders have the same high expectations for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) as they do for all others. Children with SEND are exceptionally well catered for.

Adults tailor activities and the environment so that pupils with SEND learn the same curriculum as other children and achieve as well as they can.

Staff know children very well and build warm and supportive relationships with them. This underpins the highly effective way in which personal, social and emotional development (PSED) is taught as an integral part of the curriculum.

Children respond exceptionally well to the school's high expectations for their behaviour. All staff use the same language for gaining children's attention and guiding them as they walk to group activities around the nursery. Staff teach children how to recognise their feelings and talk about them.

They skilfully turn any instances where children disagree into opportunities to teach them how to take turns and resolve conflicts gently. The consistent language of 'recognising problems' and 'identifying solutions' is learned as children talk about stories. This language framework helps them to talk about the difficult situations they encounter in real life.

Staff encourage children to work independently and be confident in their choices. As a result, children develop a healthy sense of identity and self-worth. Learning across other aspects of the early years foundation stage curriculum is equally rich.

The school ensures that developing children's spoken language underpins every area of the curriculum. Adults throughout the nursery consistently model the high-quality use of language in ways that children find irresistible. They constantly reinforce language, repeating precisely planned key words and using language to model activities.

For example, while dressing dolls and teddies, children are encouraged to consider whether the clothes are 'too big' or 'too small'. They sing number ditties and nursery rhymes and act out counting. Adults skilfully bring stories and characters to life during children's play.

As children build towers with large bricks, each child stands against it to see if they are taller or shorter. For example, they delight at being the wolf and the pigs from Little Red Riding Hood, rehearsing parts of the story and blowing the tower down.

Governors bring expert support to leaders' compelling vision for excellent early years practice.

The school's deep knowledge of early childhood development benefits other settings that they share their expertise with.

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 October 2014.

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