All about us

Clowns Nurseries have been established since 1990 and we have 4 Nurseries in the Derbyshire area:

Butterly Park-Ripley, Ironville, North Wingfield and Clay Cross.

We are a family run business with a very stable, long serving staff team. Most of our staff have been with us for 5, 10, 15 and 20 years plus.

We are confident that your child will enjoy the experience on offer here. Our aim is to provide a structured environment in which your child can grow and develop through learning and play, to become a happy, secure, confident and independent young person.

Our Company Manager, Jeanette Waterall and Development Manager, Kelly Atkin, ensure that each Nursery maintains the highest standard of quality care and education expected from every Clowns Nursery.

Our Mission, Vision & Values

Our Mission

Providing quality care and education for each unique child in a safe, friendly and encouraging environment

Our Vision

Provide quality care to nurture each child to their best potential.

With a motivated, professional, dedicated and inspirational team.

Continuously improving child development and sector knowledge.

Enabling our children to grow and develop in a natural environment.

Empowering our children to have the tools to become confident, independent individuals.

Our Values

Child focused

Links with parents, agencies and the community

Outstanding environments

Well-being

Nurture & grow

Support

During your child's time with Clowns Nursery we aim to:

Develop a strong, positive self image for each unique child - whilst encouraging social skills, co-operative and collaborative interaction.
Encourage confidence and independence - balanced with kindness, thoughtfulness and good manners.
Have pride in who they are - whilst having tolerance and respect for our diverse world.
Grown and build strong, healthy bodies - with an awareness of the importance of good diet, exercise and hygiene.
Experience joy, wonder and challenge - within a safe, enabling environment.
Enjoy everything we have around us in the natural world - but be mindful of our responsibility to protect in fragility.
Have open, enquiring minds to access the tools needed to continue their learning journey through life.

Child Focused:

Our high-quality education and care is inclusive of all children.

We acknowledge that the development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness supports our children’s imagination and creativity.

We offer our children regular opportunities to engage in arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials.
Staff plan activities of high quality and variety of what the children see, hear, and participate in. This is to help develop their understanding, self-expression, vocabulary, and ability to communicate through the arts.

Play is essential for children’s development. Building their confidence as they learn to explore, relate to others, set their own goals and solve problems.
Children learn by leading their own play, and by taking part in play which is guided by our staff.

As practitioners we offer all children of all ages an educational programme for mathematics.
Offering our smallest children the opportunities to build using a variety of natural resources or blocks and help to apply this understanding. It is important that children develop positive attitudes and interests in mathematics, look for patterns and relationships, spot connections, ‘have a go’, talk to our staff about what they notice and not to be afraid to make mistakes.

Links with parents, agencies and the community:

Our educational programme for understanding the world involves guiding our children to make sense of their physical world and their community. Offering our children, a wide range of personal experiences will increase their knowledge and sense of the world around them.

Introducing and meeting important members of our local community such like firefighters, police officers, nurses, local shop workers will help build children knowledge of the local community that we live in.

Listening to our parents/carers regularly and giving parents clear information about their child’s progress and time spent at Clowns will offer them reassurance and to be involved in their child’s learning between Nursery and the home environment.

Here at Clowns we pride ourselves on our robust key person system ensuring that parents/carers feel able to share vital information about their child’s intimate care preferences, likes and dislikes, motivations and interests and how they feel about being away from home.

Outstanding Environments:

Physical activity is vital in children’s all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy, and active lives.

Our well-planned learning environments, indoor and outdoor is an important part of our children’s learning and achievements.

These environments allows children to be able to have the freedom to choose what they want to learn throughout their play.
We ensure we provide experiences to enable their learning and development.

Gross and fine motor experiences are planned for at nursery to develop motor skills gradually throughout early childhood.

By us creating games and providing opportunities for play both indoors and outdoors adults can support children to develop their core strength, stability, balance, special awareness coordination and agility.

Well-being:

We believe that children need secure and caring relationships to be able to learn how to effectively interact with each other, make friends and develop a understanding of right and wrong which will help them manage their behaviour and deal better with conflict.

By helping children develop their PSED skills we are giving children the best start as we know that children’s early PSED has a huge impact on their later life, including their future well-being, learning achievements and economic success.

These strong relationships will also help children develop a positive attitude about themselves, their abilities and about what they can achieve.

Nurture & Grow:

The development of children’s spoken language underpins all the 7 areas of learning and development.

The quality and number of conversations that our children have with adults and their peers throughout their nursery day is crucial.

A language rich environment is essential. Through outstanding levels of conversation, storytelling and role play, where children can share their ideas with support and modelled from our staff and sensitive questioning that invites them to elaborate, children become comfortable using a rich range of vocabulary and language.

Its crucial that our children develop a life-long love for reading.

It develops when we talk with children about the world around them, and the books we read with them, and enjoying rhymes, poems and songs together.

Support:

At Clowns we support the growth of our ever-growing team. It’s essential that our staff team are continuously growing in knowledge of the childcare sector.

When our children and families enter our settings, we ensure that our team provide continuity and we believe a child’s keys person is an essential link between home and our nursery and is vital in providing reassurance and creating a close, supportive, ongoing relationship with our families.

A key person has special responsibilities for supporting a specific group of children. Our key persons helps the child to feel known, understood, cared about and safe. The key person role involves a triangle of trust with the child and their family.