Welcome to our Nursery

Welcome to our Nursery – providing the right environment

Welcome to our Nursery. Our nursery school offers outstanding government-funded education to children from 3-4 years old. We are a Reggio inspired Early Years Setting with a beautiful learning environment and exciting curriculum. We were rated Outstanding by Ofsted who said…

The environment is stimulating and exciting. It is carefully designed to promote development in all areas of the curriculum. The quality of teaching is outstanding. Teachers have an astute grasp of children’s abilities and this is due to ongoing close observation. Teachers have been supported to run a number of school improvement projects, such as speech and language development and early mathematics, which have resulted in resounding success. The sharp focus on the higher standards has led to significant leaps in the proportion of children who are exceeding age-related expectations

We would love to show you around our beautiful and unique school…

Our school has always shown a strong commitment to providing high quality learning for our youngest children. We have been extremely lucky having a governing body who value the EYFS and understand the importance of getting it right for children from the start and have been fully supportive of the school’s initiatives to make our learning spaces fully interactive and motivating.

The school believe that providing a rich and supportive learning environment is important to inspire children – to lead them to a place of curiosity.

A learning environment for our school had to include a large natural outdoor learning space. We have developed our inside learning space based upon the Reggio philosophy of how children experience life and learning. It was important to extend this philosophy outdoors to create a sense of both calm and purpose and to enable the children to play and learn seamlessly from indoors to outdoors.

Children at St Andrew’s Nursery are able to engage in larger scale play within “nature”, a space where physicality, movement and doing are important aspects of learning and can engage children in a different way to indoors.

When we created our outdoor learning space, we wondered what it should be like from a child’s perspective, so we consulted with the children…

“Mud, sand, water, mixing, transporting, carrying heavy things, having transport systems, climbing, climbing high and being a bit scared, having some danger, hiding, making dens “. Our children had very clear views.

Our EYFS outside provision provides some physical risk and challenge, opportunities for children to work collaboratively, opportunities for them to get their hands dirty – opportunities for working with a range of sensory materials.

We understand that children need to be in contact with nature in their play. We have created a generous and powerful learning environment that supports child led learning and development.

Our learning space gives children the opportunity to think, repeat and return to things over long periods. It allows our children to collaborate, grow ideas, reason and problem-solve. It provides open-ended opportunities for their play.

We chose high quality designers - Earthwrights. We feel that they provided wonderful craftsmanship and inspirational play space with ethics and values that matched our ethos. The play structures are landscaped and drew on the positive features of our existing landscape. Their work brings children into contact with nature and brings nature back into play to create a magical space that we know the children will cherish for years to come.

Our outdoor learning space enables our youngest children to be challenged and to thrive.