About Us
Abacus is a privately owned children's nursery, fully staffed and equipped to satisfy the emotional, social, intellectual and physical needs of your child. The management team has a vast amount of early years experience and are all highly qualified. Abacus has grown to be a busy nursery over the past few years employing up to 15 members of staff. All of the Abacus team have a genuine love for working in Early Years.
We go above and beyond at Abacus to offer children a full and rich experience. Key workers plan for their children and provide many exciting activities to support individual development. We also offer Sports sessions, Yoga, Mindfulness, Forest school sessions and have visits from outside agencies such as 'Mini Footy', and 'Music Bugs'.
Rated 'Outstanding'
Abacus Nursery is registered with Ofsted to provide full day care for children from three months of age up until school age. At our last Ofsted inspection in November 2022 we were awarded ‘Outstanding’ in all areas. This is the highest judgement and a great testament to our staff’s hard work and dedication to providing the highest standard of care. We operate an inclusion and equality policy and ensure that all children are provided with the opportunity to thrive.
Our Values
We greatly value our partnership with parents and strive to keep parents well informed about our policies and procedures and of course their individual children's progress and development. We have a variety of noticeboards and displays to inform parents of general information, along with monthly newsletters.
We believe that safeguarding each child whilst at nursery is at the centre of our care. We ensure that all the staff have undergone safeguarding training. Our Manager and Deputy are both fully trained in safeguarding.
Opening Times
We are open Monday to Friday 8am - 6pm. Abacus Nursery is an all year provider, only closing over Christmas and on Bank holidays.
Our Meals
Mealtimes at Abacus are two-fold. We understand nutrition is obviously very important but we also value the importance of children developing good social skills through the spontaneous learning that happens during these very important times in a child’s daily routine. Our menus are carefully planned each winter and summer on a two-week rota to ensure each day's home cooked meals are healthy, nutritious and well balanced.
Funding Options
We accept funding for 2, 3 and 4-year-old children which can be used to reduce your fees. To ensure your nursery invoice remains the same each months attendance, the funding reduction is 'stretched' and calculated over the academic year.
Play & Learning
Play allows children to try out ideas and concepts without fear of failure as they are able to set their own goals, and take ownership of their learning experiences. This therefore, also develops their self-worth and confidence as they experience successes, and see their own interests and ideas being valued by others. Play not only provides the means for their holistic learning and development, but also an opportunity to discover that learning can be fun; helping them to build an intrinsic motivation for learning.
In order to ensure that children receive a balance of child-initiated and adult-led play opportunities, a range of adult-led activities are carried out during each week. These activities are play based and either planned to provide learning opportunities to extend development, or to support a child’s interest or schema.
We track your child's learning journey through Tapestry, an online system that you can access from home. This will enable you to follow your child’s individual progress closely. You can also add observations, photos and videos from home so that staff are better informed about what your child enjoys doing outside of the nursery. Tapestry is a safe and secure system, the security of your data is a huge priority for us.
Hygge & The Curiosity Approach
Hygge (pronounced hue-guh) is a Danish word used when acknowledging a feeling or moment, as cosy or charming. Our Hygge room, named 'The Snug' is very calm, with natural resources which provides children with a place to retreat away from the hustle and bustle of the main movement of the nursery. Within our Hygge room we offer many natural, open ended play opportunities for the children where they can investigate and explore with confidence and curiosity.
Our Mission
We strive:-
To provide, a ‘home from home’ environment where children’s needs come first. Staff work in partnership with parents/carers and outside agencies (when required) to ensure that every child has the opportunity to reach their full potential, in fun and safe surroundings.