What Makes us Outstanding
At Dimples there are many things that we believe make us outstanding. Here is a snapshot of some of these things. Our professional and dedicated staff provide excellent care and fabulous learning experiences for the children. We strive to ensure that all Dimples' children experience a fun and stimulating day.
We have a dedicated Forest school cabin and field which allows the children to spend the whole day at Forest school. The Forest school ethos is embedded in our nursery for all ages with all rooms having direct access to the outside space allowing the children to choose if they wish to be inside or outside. Forest school sessions are lead by one of of our trained Forest school leaders and take place weekly for children from 2 years upwards. During Forest school sessions the children learn so many new skills including using hand drills, fire lighting, cooking on the fire, identify different insects and birds, building dens and so much more.
We use a local butchers to buy our meat from, and a local green grocers provide our fruit and vegetables. Our eggs are also bought from the local butcher so they are fresher than eggs bought in the supermarket. All food is freshly prepared on site by our cook and her assistant who are both highly trained chefs with recent and up to date food hygiene qualifications. We have a 5 star food hygiene rating.
The yoghurts we use at Dimples are pro biotic yoghurts because they contain live bacteria that helps keep your child's gut healthy.
The children take part in weekly gardening club sessions. Nick our gardener works closely with the children to teach them about growing fruits and vegetables. The children enjoy the produce as part of their snack and the kitchen team use the produce in the children's lunches. Gardening club teaches the children so many essential life skills.
All children over the age of one year are served honey whilst they are at nursery as it contains various ingredients including pollen allergens and components of honeybees, which is a natural remedy for symptoms of allergies and asthma. Locally produced honey helps to reduce the effects of hay fever while the children are at the nursery because it contains pollen as the bees have harvested from the locality.
Ofsted's recommended ratio in pre-school (over 3's) states there should be one adult to every eight children however we believe this is too high and always try to have a ratio of one adult to every six children. The higher ratio of staff to children ensures there is more staff to interact with the children. We also go to the woods, field, park and on trips so extra staff keep the children safe. Recently the ratio for 2-3 year olds has been changed by Ofsted from a 1:4 ratio to a 1:5 ratio, we feel that the latter ratio dilutes the care and education available to the children and therefore we have continued with a 1:4 ratio. We feel that smaller ratios enables us to prioritise the children's and staff's well-being, practitioners are able to spend quality time with their key children playing with them and extending their knowledge and understanding.
Play
Children should
be allowed to be children. The child is at the centre of everything that we do and children are given every opportunity to follow activities that interest them and to learn through play. We follow the framework of the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) which supports a play based approach. There has been much in the press about the new ‘baby curriculum’ and there are fears that many nurseries will revert to a ‘worksheet’ ethos where children are taught by rote where they sit at desks and are forced to write and begin to read. We WILL NOT be one of these nurseries. We cannot endorse the importance of play enough. We are not being lazy and opting for the easier approach.
Our children will not be behind children who attend nurseries who offer the ‘worksheet approach’. We receive very high feedback from primary schools that when children arrive they are independent and capable children who are ready and willing to learn. In fact, research shows that children who follow their interests are more engaged and they learn more. Children have more opportunities to be creative, they develop their problem solving skills, they have high levels of well being and their involvement is higher. In short, we have happy, stimulated children who learn skills for lifelong learning. They are confident, happy, independent and motivated.
Outdoor Play
This is a main focus at Dimples. Think back to your own childhood, what is your happiest childhood memory. Whenever we ask this question we are usually given an answer that involves playing outdoors: on a bike, climbing a tree, kicking a ball, sledging. Children learn ‘real things’ when they play outside. They learn concepts such as enormous and small. When children look in a picture book at a tree and a lady bird they cannot accurately comprehend their differences in size. However, when outside children can look in awe at an enormous tree and in wonder at a lady bird on their hand. They can feel the effects of trekking to the woods on their bodies as they learn about the benefits of exercise and compare colours of leaves from brown to gold to red. All five senses are stimulated and these are the things that really make a difference to children’s learning.
Growing our own Staff
Work based learners-we offer (on average) 3 young trainees per year the opportunity to train for an early years qualification whilst working for Dimples. These trainees are ‘supernumary’ when they first start, which means they are not counted in the adult to child ratio. Many nurseries employ work based learners (WBL) and count them in the ratios immediately because it is a cost effective way of recruiting and employing staff. However, with our very high standards we no not believe that this makes for a quality service. We employ these students as extras so that they can learn good practice whilst shadowing more senior practitioners and it also increases our adult to child ratios. We believe that this is extremely useful as we spend so much time going to the field, woods, country park and on trips. Due to the fact that these young people learn the ‘Dimples Way’ they have very high standards of care, affection and interaction with the children. They receive training from a nationally recognised training provider as well as excellent support from the mentors within the nursery and from in-house training. Once qualified many of these trainees progress to permanent employment with us and some of our senior staff started out as Work Based Learners.
Reflective Practice
It is not enough to gain an ‘Outstanding’ inspection grade with Ofsted. To ensure that we offer consistently high quality care and education for our children we constantly reflect on what we do to assess how we can improve upon it.
All practitioners are involved in team meetings, team leader meetings, whole staff meetings and training on a weekly and monthly basis.
Each room runs like a mini nursery so that each team can reflect on what works for them and to make changes that benefit their children.
The Dimples team are very much like a family. We communicate with one another very well and we strive for the best for our children.
Qualifications
There has been a huge amount of research that shows that nurseries who have highly qualified staff offer better quality care and education. We believe that constant reflection and training to improve practitioner knowledge and understanding is vital in maintaining quality. Life experiences and staff personalities are also very important. New staff attend working second interviews so that we can see how they interact with children and our team and the views of our existing team members are sought before any decisions are made to employ. Good team dynamics are extremely important and many of our parents comment on the fact that the teams are so solid and fantastic. Staff are given an article or piece of research to read every month so that they are kept up to date with current thinking.
Risk Taking
We believe that children should be allowed to take risks in order to develop their confidence, independence and life skills. We are not reckless. We do still risk assess but if our risk assessments show that there are small risks present but the overall experience outweighs these risks, the children will be allowed to proceed.
Real Food for Role Play
The children can play with real fruit and vegtables to role play going to the supermarket or making dinner in the home corner. We believe playing with the real food gives children more of an understanding to the true colours of fruit as plastic items all seem to be the same colour however in real life brocolli is a different shade of green to a pear. Real food also helps children to experiment with weights learning concepts such as heavy, light, bigger and smaller.