‘It’s our Nature to Nurture’ sits at the very core of all that we do. It forms a foundation for the amazing team to grow our curriculum. We use the Early Years Foundation Stage framework as a guide in implementing our outstanding curriculum for the children in our care. Each child is wonderfully unique so we could never adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach when planning learning experiences and environments for the children. Our experienced educators understand the huge benefits in responding to individual children’s interests and fascinations. Giving children ownership over their learning is extremely empowering and makes them enthusiastic about lifelong learning. The skilled team use children’s interests and fascinations as a basis to weave in new skills and targeted learning goals to ensure development and progress.

Our goal is to create children who are confident, resilient, and curious, with a love of learning, a passion for reading and the ability to create positive relationships. We do this by creating opportunities for children to engage with their peers in a positive way, role modelling positive interactions and relationships. We value the Key Person role in creating strong, healthy attachments with our youngest of children and continuing that golden thread throughout the children’s whole nursery experience.

We use our knowledge of different pedagogies to create an environment and experiences based on the needs of our cohorts on children. We take principles of the Pikler approach in order to create strong, caring relationships with our smallest babies, slowing down care routines and making them important learning experiences, enabling our children to feel safe and secure in order to gain confidence to explore their environment.

We pull elements of the Steiner Education approach to allow children to explore their surrounding in their own time, working on social-interaction, developing their physical co-ordination and learning to self-regulate their emotions and feelings. Our Reggio-Emilia inspired planning process and the value we place on the environment as the third teacher is evident across both our nurseries. We acknowledge how important the physical and emotional environment is for the wellbeing and education of the children and team. This way of working with our children gives the children the role of a collaborator in constructing their own learning. We use elements of The Curiosity Approach to embed a curiosity in our children, focusing on real life everyday objects and those found in nature to create learning opportunities and activities. Whilst drawing on different educational approaches from all over the world, we can create our very own and unique curriculum for us here in Portishead.

We work hard to create authentic relationships with all our children and their families and wholeheartedly believe in strong parent partnerships to ensure a holistic approach to our care and education. We hold parent events throughout the year and we also offer meetings between parents and their child’s key person to review their child’s development and progress. We are fortunate enough to have a unique online learning profile system for our team and parents to use. The team capture snapshot observations which usually consist of a short video clip or photo to bring the children’s learning to life. Parents are given their own log in details to access their child’s profile and are even able to like and comment on the observations captured.

Portishead is such a close-knit community and we are so lucky to have both our nurseries in such a beautiful town. We believe that strong links with the community help to teach children about their responsibility as a citizen and are proud to support Portishead in Bloom and Turn the Tide. We are also passionate about reducing our carbon footprint as a company, as well as teaching the children about how we can be more environmentally friendly. We use cleaning products that are kinder to the environment, we have significantly reduced our single use plastic consumption over the last 12 months and are now committing to only using biodegradable wipes – every little helps!