The Little Ripley Day Nursery

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The provision is outstanding

The management and staff team are passionate about providing high-quality, inclusive care and education to all. They strive to constantly enhance all areas of practice to the highest possible level. Staff focus strongly on building excellent relationships with children and parents when children begin at the setting.

Children are extremely happy, anticipating the day ahead with great enthusiasm as they arrive at nursery. Children have formed exceptionally close bonds with staff, who are calm, nurturing and skilful practitioners. Staff ensure that the environment is inviting and safe, and they encourage children to make fr...ee choices about where they learn and play.

Children demonstrate a huge desire to explore and learn. Their learning is fully extended as staff subtly join in with their play to challenge their thinking and develop their problem-solving abilities. Children persevere and show great determination to succeed at tasks.

They behave exceptionally well and develop firm friendships with each other. All staff share consistently high expectations for children's learning. They uphold a shared vision to help children to grow into confident, independent, kind and helpful individuals.

This results in intense enthusiasm throughout the nursery, enabling children to flourish.

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

The manager has successfully embedded a reflective culture. This motivates and empowers all staff to continuously look for ways to improve the experiences they give children.

Staff closely monitor children's progress and follow their emerging interests, including what they have been doing at home, to improve outcomes further for children. Staff use this information to deliver an exceptional curriculum and a learning environment in which children thrive. They plan for what each individual child needs to learn next and help them to make the best possible progress.

Staff are skilled at interacting with children. Children learn new vocabulary and staff improve children's pronunciation of sounds by repeating words back to them. This supports children's pronunciation and vocabulary to extremely high levels.

Children gain excellent communication, language and literacy skills in English, and also gain valuable skills in hearing and speaking French during weekly French sessions.Children are offered an inspiring range of activities that quickly capture their interest. They are confident and display a 'can-do' attitude.

They are extremely keen to enjoy the outdoor environment, where they engage in pretend play, for example, in the well-resourced mud kitchen. Children successfully construct a 'brick wall' in the role-play construction area. They work together harmoniously to mix natural materials and use these as 'cement'.

They decide how to make an effective consistency of the cement by adding more water. The expert interventions of staff further support children to explain why their 'concrete' will make their tower of bricks even stronger. Children take account of the ideas other children contribute because they have strong peer relationships.

Group sessions are planned meticulously to build on children's current knowledge and to introduce more formal learning in preparation for their move on to school. For instance, children actively take turns to communicate information to the rest of the group as they use picture cards to build their own story. They acquire superb listening and concentration skills as they discuss the weather, the different habitats of fish, and learn about frogs, tadpoles and frogspawn.

Staff help children to develop control and coordination and to gain confidence in their own abilities. They enjoy weekly cooking sessions and thoughtfully planned activities, such as jigsaws, threading and malleable resources, which help children to develop their early writing skills. Very young children receive excellent support from the attentive staff team.

Babies show extremely high levels of curiosity as they discover the sounds made by different musical instruments, and they enjoy songs and nursery rhymes.Managers strongly value their staff team. They successfully ensure that staff have manageable workloads to enable them to feel continually happy and motivated in their roles.

Self-evaluation is highly accurate and focuses sharply on continually improving outcomes for the children. Frequent evaluations of practice and purposeful supervision meetings are skilfully aimed at enriching staff's expert knowledge and practice. Managers ensure that staff receive meaningful training opportunities that they use to further improve their practice.

Partnership working with parents is excellent. Staff share daily information with parents via the online communication system and through discussions and conversations. Parents express their utmost satisfaction with the nursery.

They describe how settled and happy their children are. Parents say they feel that staff really care about their children.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.

Managers and staff have a robust knowledge of child protection issues. They are familiar with the procedure to take prompt and efficient action should they have any concerns about children's welfare. Staff have a very good understanding of the signs that may indicate a child may be at risk of harm, including from radical and extreme views.

Managers follow robust recruitment procedures to ensure the suitability of all staff. Staff are clear on what to do if they have a concern about the behaviour of another adult. Staff diligently supervise children and take effective steps to review all risk assessments, should any accidents occur.

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