A NURSERY in Charlbury is celebrating a recent Ofsted report that saw it leap from a rating of ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’.

Inspectors paid a visit to Little Monkeys, in Church Street, in August and graded the nursery outstanding across the board.

Manager Kelly Harley, who took the nursery over with Karen Cox just four years ago, was delighted to see her staff praised for their work.

When inspectors visited the nursery they observed managers, assessed interactions between children and staff and spoke to parents, members of the team and children.

They went on to award the nursery a grade of ‘outstanding’ in all four categories: effectiveness of leadership and management; quality of teaching, learning and assessment; personal development, behaviour and welfare; and outcomes for children.

Inspector Catherine Clarke said: “Management have a strong drive for achieving excellence. They lead their extremely competent and caring staff exceptionally well to ensure the very high quality of children's care and education.

“Children immensely enjoy being at nursery. They develop extremely positive attitudes to learning. They are highly confident and inquisitive about the world around them.

“Staff make extremely astute observations and assessments of children's interests, learning and development. They plan really exciting and engaging learning activities and resources that lead to children's excellent progress across their learning.

“And children develop highly competent social skills and independence. Staff support children extremely well to understand and manage their own and other children's feelings, and to play alongside each other and learn how to make and be good friends.”

Ms Harley said she and Ms Cox had, since taking over the nursery in 2012, worked extremely hard to get it to the level it is now at.

She said: “It all went really well and I’m so proud of the staff and how hard they’ve worked.

“It was nice that they picked up on the staff team being very close, and noted how well everyone works together.

“We're both from this community and when we took this place over we knew we wanted to give working parents the help they need. The staff we employ really enjoy their jobs. It’s more than just a job to them.”

While the report was full of glowing praise for Little Monkeys, it did suggest improvements could be made in developing less experienced staff’s skills in teaching children about space and measurements.

Little Monkeys offer full time provision to children up to the age of eight. It currently has 66 children on its roll who are cared for by 21 members of staff.