‘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
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
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!