Ashbourne Day Nurseries at Fenny Stratford

Grade summary

Each dot represents one of the six inspection categories. Headline is the average of the six grades, rounded up.

Category grades

• The provider does not ensure that staff use strategies and tools, such as communication boards and picture timetables, provided by other professionals to support children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. This does not help these children to understand when there will be a change of activity in daily routines or the expectations for how to behave in the setting.
• The curriculum design is weak and leaders have not had sufficient oversight of what children are learning. Without an effective manager, staff lost confidence in their abilities and cannot explain sufficiently how their teaching and activities help children to progress. Staff are not always clear on what they expect children to learn. This means that children do not experience teaching and activities that help them to build on what they already know. Sometimes, they lack meaningful engagement and enjoyment in their learning.
• A lack of communication between staff and failure to adhere to safe supervision and policy and procedures, led to an incident occurring where a child was out of sight and hearing for a significant period of time. This placed the child at risk of emotional and physical harm. Staff were not alert to the child being missing, indicating that the key-person arrangements are not effective.

Continual changes to the management at the nursery have had a detrimental impact on children's day-to-day experiences. Staff deployment and supervision do not adequately meet children's needs and children are not making the progress which they are capable of. The changes in management and lack of strong leadership have undermined parents' confidence in the nursery and affect continuity in care for children. Children with special educational needs and/or disabilities do not receive the support that they need to enable them to thrive.