The Early Years Foundation Stage emphasises the importance of key relationships for children, including those relationships between children, their parents/carers and a key person within a setting. At Little Learners we recognise and value the importance of these relationships and allow plenty of time, opportunities and experiences for strong relationships to build.

By implementing and maintaining an established key person system, children’s individual needs, interests and passions for learning will be observed and recorded to ensure we can effectively meet them and care for the children to the best of our abilities, helping them to feel safe, secure and settled at our Nursery. Our secret to successful, strong relationships with our children and their parents/carers, will be through our thorough settling in process, which will include a home visit if you require and allow each child enough quality time to get to know the whole team, their new surroundings at nursery and most importantly their key person.

Your child’s key person will be your first point of contact within the nursery, as it is important that positive relationships can be established between yourself and your key person, to assist your child’s settling in process and continued enjoyment within nursery. We also feel that it is important for parents/carers to have a named person to go to when you would like to pass on some information about your child - too many faces and names can get confusing at the best of times, and it is important you know that the information you have given is valued and understood.

Although we believe that our key person system is at the heart of your child’s development within the nursery, we do strongly encourage positive relationships with all other staff, to avoid distress in the absence of your child’s key person, for example holidays and training. Because of this reason, we operate a buddy system where two members of staff work in partnership to implement an effective key person system. These two members of staff will use each other’s help and expertise when evaluating their key children’s learning and development. That way, when your child’s key person is not present for some reason, there will be another member of staff who knows the child well and has spent time to build up a positive relationship.

We try to organise our staffing rotas in a way that allows all staff plenty of quality time with their key children, to maximise the children’s security, self-esteem and enjoyment within the nursery.