Shepherd Primary School Nursery, Rickmansworth: Inside Nursery Lambs

Three-year-olds at Shepherd Primary join a class with a name of its own. Nursery Lambs is a morning class taking children from the term after they turn three, and new starters arrive at the beginning of each term rather than in one September wave. A child who turns three in February begins the following summer, joining a handful of others rather than a whole cohort at once.

The class sits inside the school in Mill End, on the western edge of Rickmansworth, and shares its planning with the school's Reception year. Everything happens in a single morning block, so this is early education first and childcare second.

Mornings run from 8:40 to 12:00, Monday to Friday, with an optional lunch club until 1pm. Learning follows the Early Years Foundation Stage, the framework every early years setting in England works to, and the school builds its Nursery and Reception programmes on a topic-based approach centred on high-quality texts. A Foundation Stage Handbook maps the progression of skills from Nursery through to the end of Reception, so what a three-year-old meets in a story is chosen with an eye on what comes at five.

Indoors, the room is set up for handling things rather than sitting still: sand, water, paint, natural materials, small world toys such as dinosaurs and vehicles, and a home corner with a dressing up box. Outdoors is not held back as a reward. Staff take every chance to explore, discover, climb and run, and support children through den building and obstacle courses.

Singing, nursery rhymes and mark-making tools fill much of the rest, with creativity judged by the doing rather than by a finished product. Yoga and mindfulness exercises, most of them focused on breathing, give children a way back to stillness and calm. Growth mindset language carries the same idea into learning: ability grows with effort, and a failed attempt is information rather than a verdict.

Every child is assigned a Key Worker, described by the school as a special person that child can go to. Greetings are treated as a technique rather than a courtesy: adults come down to the child's level, show warmth and a smile, and greet each child with enthusiasm at the start of the morning. Emotional language runs through the session to build the vocabulary a child needs before they can name what they are feeling, which is the groundwork most three-year-old conflicts turn on.

Snack time is treated as practice at being sociable rather than as a pause in the morning, and self-care skills are worked on alongside it. Children staying on under the thirty-hour arrangement eat a home packed lunch, while school meals come from Herts Catering Ltd, with vegetarian choices marked on the menu and allergies handled through the caterer's own process. Responsibility for additional needs sits with the school's SENCO, a role held by an assistant head teacher, so a conversation about extra support goes to a senior leader rather than being passed along a chain.

Attending Nursery Lambs does not get a child into Shepherd's Reception class, and the school says so directly: attendance at its nursery does not guarantee a place in Reception, and a fresh application must be made even for a child already attending. Nursery applications are made directly to the school; Reception places are allocated by Hertfordshire County Council, and the two processes share nothing but the building.

That application is made online through Hertfordshire's admissions service, in the county's normal Reception round, with an on-time closing date in mid-January before the September start, while the nursery year is still running. Where a school is contested, the county's published admission rules set the order: children looked after and previously looked after first, then a child with a medical or social need for that particular school, then a child with a sibling on the roll at the time of application, then children for whom it is their nearest school, with distance separating the rest. Nursery attendance is not one of the rules.

What the nursery offers is continuity of curriculum rather than of place: the Foundation Stage Handbook carries the progression of skills from Nursery straight through to the end of Reception, and the class shares a site with the Reception children who follow it. Reception admits once a year, in the September after a child turns four, and a family may take a part-time place until the term after the fifth birthday or defer entry until later in that school year.

Applications for the nursery go directly to the school and stay open all year through an online form. The starting term follows the birthday: 1 April to 31 August means an autumn start, 1 September to 31 December means spring, and 1 January to 31 March means summer.

The funded structure is the thing to plan around. Fifteen funded hours are taken as the five mornings, 8:40 to 12:00. Working parents eligible for thirty funded hours cannot take them all on one site: the school provides twenty, the morning plus a lunch club, after which Berry Lane Nursery collects those children at 1pm and keeps them until 3pm. Those ten hours are arranged with Berry Lane directly, not through the school. That is two settings and a midday handover, worth testing against a real working week before accepting a place.

Collection is at 12:00, or 1pm for lunch club families. Enquiries and the application form go through the school office on Shepherd's Lane.