About Us: The Preschool & Nursery

Guildhall Feoffment Preschool and Nursery is a registered charity. Our manager, Carly Shannon, is responsible for the day-to-day operation of Guildhall Feoffment Preschool and Nursery. The Nursery Management Committee helps monitor all nursery requirements to ensure that the principles, objectives and values of the nursery are upheld. The committee consists of nursery parents and people within the local community to ensure a balanced and impartial representation. We have a separate fundraising committee that consists of parents that help to plan fun activities for our families as well as raise funds to purchase new experiences and resources for our children.

Our Approach to Learning

Our intent is to offer a curriculum rich in curiosity and memorable experiences, which means instead of prescribed tasks, your child will be encouraged to explore their own imagination and have the freedom to choose their path whilst being supported by our team of professional staff. We encourage and support children’s natural desire to learn, explore and question, through our enabling environments that provides child-initiated play.
We have adopted the ethos of ‘The Curiosity Approach’ in our setting which puts the fun back into learning, allowing our children to explore resources, the natural environment and aims to create children who are ‘thinkers and doers’ instead of passive learners who simply follow the direction of an adult. We encourage your child’s curiosity to explore and to ask questions without a fear of ‘getting it wrong’.

Promoting Language Development

We prioritise creating a ‘language-rich’ environment through the use of songs, nursery rhymes, stories, and providing time for quality interactions between adults and between peers. Trained staff ensure that interactions are positive and progressive, allowing children to flourish and gather words at pace in order to become confident communicators.

Stimulating Environment

We work hard to provide a stimulating and safe environment that offers exciting opportunities, promotes challenge, exploration, adventure, and a real love of learning. This helps children to develop physically, socially, cognitively, and emotionally in an environment that values everybody. All children are treated as individuals and as equals, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religious or cultural background.

Encouraging Confidence and Independence

We aim for our children to be confident and independent, to believe in themselves, and interact positively with others. We believe that allowing children to make choices, take risks and learn from their own experiences, encourages them to become confident in their own ability to succeed. We understand that play, building warm trusting relationships with the child, positive relationships with parents, and providing consistent routines, is an integral part of achieving this and is at the heart of our early years curriculum.

Support for Educational Needs

Our ethos is to support all children’s interests and abilities. Our Deputy Manager, Tracey Griggs, and our Assistant Manager, Millie Frankum, are our Special Educational Needs Coordinator’s (SENCO) who support nursery staff and work with outside specialists to put appropriate SEN provision in place.

Our Aims

The children are at the heart of everything that we do, and we believe that each and every individual child deserves the best start in life, where children are allowed to be and are valued for being themselves.

• We aim to provide the building blocks for our children t succeed and reach their own individual achievements.
• We aim to develop young minds and hearts in a safe, caring, friendly, inclusive and inspiring environment which meets the needs of each individual child to learn, play and thrive.
• We aim to work in partnership with parents to ensure all children happily flourish and achieve.
• We aim to lay the foundation for all round development and lifelong learning.
• We aim for our children to display high levels of well-being, joy and happiness.
• We aim to provide engaging opportunities for our children, that open up their world, allow them to feel safe, to take risks, and regardless of whether they succeed or fail, every experience is a learning opportunity.
• We aim for our children to become capable, confident and independent learners, by enabling them to follow their own curiosities, learning and interests.