Working together to support learning

Everything you do with the children at home contributes to your child’s development and we aim to work alongside you to give the children the best opportunities possible.  You will learn more about our curriculum from our newsletters and information board.  We encourage you to share the activities and information with your child. A planned programme of home learning experiences will be available throughout the year to help you support your child’s learning.  Please do not hesitate to speak to the Head of nursery if you require advice about helping your child to acquire specific skills.

Supporting children with additional support needs

In order to achieve their full potential, children will experience a curriculum appropriate to their needs.  There may be occasions where it is felt that children may benefit from specialist help. The nursery may make referrals, with the consent of parents, to other agencies such as speech and language therapists or educational psychologist, where appropriate. Staff liaise effectively with other agencies, and attend in-service training to ensure that they are knowledgeable about issues affecting children who require additional support.

We will request appropriate adaptations to the physical environment of our building, where appropriate, to address the needs of children with physical or sensory impairments.

Working together to promote positive behaviour

The children are encouraged to co-operate with each other, to share and to be considerate.  We promote a positive ethos and adopt positive behaviour management strategies. Appropriate behaviour is praised and encouraged.  When inappropriate behaviour occurs, staff intervene sensitively to redirect the child, explain the inappropriateness of the earlier behaviour, and provide opportunities for children to express and explore their feelings, needs and preferences in socially appropriate ways. Our PATHS programme helps to support this.  

The Nursery has a policy on ‘Promoting Positive Behaviour’.

Working with you

At the beginning of the session, parents are asked to share their knowledge of their child with the staff. This enables the staff to have an understanding of the child at home, the interests of the child and the other adults involved. Parents are encouraged to discuss any problems or worries and share information about events in family life, holidays, visits, illnesses, accidents, separation etc. This information will be added to your child’s plan to help staff meet the needs of your child.

Please let us know if you have any physical or sensory impairment or any reason which hinders your access to information.  We will make any reasonable adjustments to ensure equal access to information about their child to any parent, who as a consequence of their disability is meeting a difficulty.  We may, for example, arrange for an interpreter or provide a large print newsletter.

Accessibility Strategy

The nursery has a duty to ensure that all our children have equal access to the curriculum, supported as appropriate to their individual needs.  This covers not only the content of activities and teaching strategies but also appropriate adaptations to the physical environment of our building to address the needs of pupils with physical or sensory impairments.  We also need to ensure that parents who have additional needs have equal access to information about their children.  This could involve, for example, relocating the venue for parents meetings to facilitate physical access at parents evenings or individual interviews; provision of an interpreter for the deaf; agreeing a telephone contact system to provide direct feedback to parents.

In compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act and the Accessibility Strategy, the Authority will aim to maintain children who present unexpected but significant needs in relation to physical impairment in their local school.

Newsletters are available in large print on request.  Please contact the Head of Nursery, or any member of staff, if you or your child has any difficulty accessing the full range of experiences on offer within Elie Street Nursery.  There is a wide variety of help and support available.  Please let us know.  We want to help.