Sunnyside Day Care

A Bug Corner, a daily Book Of The Month and a separate space for babies give Sunnyside Day Care in Acocks Green a recognisable character. Its open-plan main nursery combines imaginative play with messier exploration, while the garden brings growing and climbing into the day. There are 52 places in total. The physical offer is appealing; the consistency of teaching deserves closer attention.

At its September 2025 inspection, Ofsted rated Sunnyside Day Care Requires Improvement and found safeguarding effective, but identified uneven teaching and progress, insufficiently precise monitoring of staff, activities that did not consistently extend learning, and weaker curriculum sequencing for older children that affected preparation for school.

For parents, that distinction matters. Attractive resources and warm relationships are part of the picture, but so is how practitioners use the day to help a child learn. Sunnyside merits consideration with those specific improvement priorities in mind.

Rooms and Ages

The Baby Room offers a separate base where care follows routines familiar from home, with music and lighting used during sleep and opportunities for supervised garden play. Rhyme time and meals also bring babies into contact with older children. That combination gives babies their own space while allowing some shared experiences across ages.

The Main Nursery combines At Home Corner and Messy Village within an open-plan room, alongside a sensory room with underwater features and soft play for quieter moments. Children can move between the play spaces. For families, the useful distinction is between areas for active exploration and somewhere to pause during a busy day.

A separate room serves children under two. In September 2025, children attending were aged 0 to 4; that inspection-era age range should be read alongside the nursery's arrangements for babies and older children, rather than as a room-by-room age allocation.

Learning and Activities

The EYFS guides the curriculum: children learn through play, conversation, movement and practical activities across its areas of learning. Sunnyside also draws on the birth to five document and organises learning around a monthly theme. The monthly themes complement the EYFS areas of learning within daily play.

Book Of The Month is a daily shared reading choice, with activities developed around the familiar story. Books also sit within play areas, including cooking books in the Home Corner and building books in the Small World Area. This connects reading with what children are doing, giving a story or picture a practical place in their play.

Writing and arts and crafts are daily activities. Children also take part in dance and movement. Outside, chalk, water and paintbrushes extend opportunities to make marks beyond an indoor table. The practical question is how these resources are matched to an individual child's next learning step, given the September 2025 concerns about purposeful planning throughout the day.

Outdoor and Community Life

Bug Corner uses interest in living things to encourage care and communication. Elsewhere in the garden, children can grow vegetables, climb and explore. Outdoor play continues through different weather conditions, making suitable clothing relevant to how children use the space.

In September 2025, outdoor activities included exploring natural objects, practising movement and talking with other children. Indoors, a home corner and a hairdresser's salon provided familiar situations for imaginative play and conversations about experiences such as different hair types. These were concrete opportunities to connect language with something children could handle or act out.

Familiar routines are central to the baby offer. The separate baby space is intended to carry home feeding, sleep and care patterns into the nursery day, and a welcome pack gathers information to help staff adapt each child's care. For a family starting childcare, the useful feature is that daily habits can be explained before they become part of nursery life.

At the September 2025 inspection, Ofsted found an effective key-person system with conversations and app updates for parents, and identified SEND support involving families and health professionals, individual sessions and emerging language strategies that helped children participate alongside others.

In September 2025, staff comforted babies, discussed emotions with older children and used ordinary tasks to encourage independence. Children chose food and drinks and put coats on their pegs. These small routines gave them practice in doing things for themselves, while shared meals offered time for conversation.

An on-site cook prepares children's meals, and menu planning follows the Birmingham Startwell initiative, which provides guidance on children's health. The nursery invites discussion of dietary needs and aims to accommodate them; allergy-affected families should establish the arrangements for their child before agreeing care.

The premises have CCTV that parents can view with the manager, immediate access to an AED Plus defibrillator, and a garden enclosed by a high fence and a lockable gate. These are practical arrangements, with the dated safeguarding judgement providing the separate assessment of effectiveness.

Sessions and Attendance

Sunnyside Day Care is at 13 Broad Road, Birmingham, B27 7UZ, in Acocks Green. Opening hours are 7.30am to 6pm on weekdays. It operates for 51 weeks each year, with closures over the festive period and on bank holidays, so those breaks need to fit a family's childcare calendar.

Applications begin through the contact form or by telephone on 0121 708 0888. The same contact route provides an application form. Off-road parking is available at the nursery, a practical consideration for families travelling by car.

Funding and Paid Extras

Government-funded childcare is offered, with funding enquiries covering children from 9 months to 4 years. Families should obtain current prices in a written quotation from the nursery and use the proposed attendance arrangement to assess the overall commitment.

• Teaching throughout the day. September 2025 concerns covered staff monitoring and the purpose of activities between planned sessions. On a visit, ask how practitioners now connect children's play and routines to their next learning steps.
• Preparation for school. Curriculum sequencing for older children was a September 2025 improvement priority. Ask for an example of how learning develops over time for an older child, rather than looking only at individual activities.
• Attendance and costs. The weekday opening window and festive closures need to fit family routines. Which booking patterns and funded-hours arrangements can form your proposed place, and how are meals and non-food consumables treated in the written quotation?
• Baby routines and dietary needs. The baby offer follows home routines, and the cook aims to accommodate dietary requirements. Use a visit to discuss your child's sleep and feeding habits, and confirm current allergy practice where relevant.

Sunnyside suits families seeking a separate baby base, an open-plan environment for older children and regular access to outdoor play within weekday childcare. Book Of The Month and Bug Corner give parents tangible examples of its daily offer. The September 2025 judgement remains the balancing factor: a decision should turn on how convincingly the nursery demonstrates purposeful teaching and a clear learning sequence for older children, alongside its care arrangements.