Free Early Years Entitlement (FEEE)

The term after your child turns 9 months you may be eligible to claim 15 hours free funding from your local council. And then the term after your child turns 3 years of age you may be able to claim an additional 15 hours. The terms start in January, April and September.

To check how much you can claim please visit: Childcare Choices | 30 Hours Free Childcare, Tax-Free Childcare and More | Help with Costs | GOV.UK

FEEE is paid to Cliffe House for 38 weeks per year for eligible children aged 9 months to 4 years, payment starts the term after they become eligible. The funding amount is deducted from your monthly fees. The 38 weeks of FEEE can be spread over the whole year for children that attend nursery all year round.

FEEE sessions are not available during school holidays, therefore extra sessions will be charged at our full rate.

If your child is eligible for FEEE you will be given a code that you will need to bring into nursery for us to check and we’ll also need your national insurance number and date of birth. You will be asked to sign a ‘Parent Agreement’ and we can then claim the funding on your behalf.

Are you thinking about a career in Early Years Education, did you know at Cliffe House we are also a training provider for early years apprenticeships!

An apprenticeship is a wonderful way to become a qualified Early Years Practitioner & Educator.

We would love to hear from passionate and inspiring people to join our fab teams as an Early Years Apprentice and help our children on their learning journeys to grow and flourish.

For more details, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Contact Tori or Sarah on tori.cliffehouse@yahoo.com or sarah.cliffehouse@yahoo.com

            

This Sunday was National Oral Health Day.

Nationally, there is a high number of children and young people suffering from tooth decay. This is highly preventable. It has been noted that up to a third of five year old children and twelve per cent of three year old children have experienced tooth decay, and the largest reason for hospital admissions for children aged between five to nine years old is for tooth extraction.

It has been recognised that there is a link between poor oral health (e.g. children suffering with toothache, infections, and who need treatment) and problems with children eating, sleeping, socialising and learning.

It is extremely important that good oral health habits are formed at the earliest age. Within nursery we do a range of different fun and exciting ways of promoting healthy eating habits and good oral health! Some ideas you may like to do at home too:

• setting up a toothbrushing activity with dolls/soft toys and real tooth brushes
• creating a dentist role-play activity
• making a big mouth with teeth using recyclable materials
• You could play a target practise game where you make “clean teeth” dirty by throwing mucky sponges and some “clean teeth” then really focus on brushing them clean.

Use pictures and books about brushing their teeth and going to the dentist.

Below are some useful resources in promoting good oral hygiene in children

Public Health England: health matters child dental health, guidance to help you prevent tooth decay in children under 5, including links to e-learning.

Children’s Oral Health: healthcare e-learning, aimed at parents, early years healthcare workers, teachers, nurses, GPs and the public.

Oral Health Foundation: early years foundation stage, how children can keep their mouth healthy and the best way to brush your teeth.

Improving oral health in early years: National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Pathways.

PACEY’s oral health advice: includes factsheet for parents.

PACEY’s nutrition spotlight, encouraging healthy eating habits.

Delivering oral health from Public Health England, includes a quick guide to healthy mouths in children.

Change4life children’s centre toolkit from Public Health England, for promoting healthy eating and dental health.

Information taken from Early Years Leadership March 2022

Our Pudsey nursery have been used as an example for promoting Oral Health in a recent Leeds For Learning publication…. here is the link to see how Oral Health is embedded in their daily practice.

Oral health – it’s not just about brushing teeth! | Leeds for Learning

Today is International Women’s day and as an industry where strong women role models are key to the quality of education our wonderful children receive, we wanted to share with you and celebrate some of our current early years educator, level 2 and level 3 students.

We are very lucky to have our own in-house training academy where Octavia, our training consultant, starts our apprentices off on their journey to becoming fully qualified nursery nurses. Octavia started her journey as an apprentice at Cliffe House many years ago, she then became a nursery nurse, room leader and deputy manager but always had a passion for teaching others and therefore decided to complete her assessors qualification. She now also trains all our practitioners in paediatric first aid too.

Here are a few images of our current level 2 and 3 students who are inspirational role models for all the children in their care.

All our children had a wonderful time celebrating World Book day last week but we wanted to share with you a lovely example of how learning at nursery can be extended at home to sustain a child’s experience and help them develop even more!

One of our Cliffe House Pudsey families shared with us how their child had loved the Billy Goats Gruff puppet show they did at nursery so much that they wanted to create one at home using their nursery shared reading book, the Princess and the pea, as his inspiration.

Our little boy ‘was so inspired by his Billy goats gruff puppet show he did in green room that he wanted to do one of his shared reading books at home! All his idea. Mum did props, lighting, script, production, artwork and C was responsible for acting and funny voices, and head artistic designer!’

What an amazing example of the power and magic of books! Our team invest a lot of their time into choosing and using stories in many different ways across all our rooms to bring stories to life. Research shows that if books are introduced to children from birth and even read to them in their Mummies tummy, they will go on to achieve and develop faster in all subjects in both primary and secondary school.

Today is National Staff Appreciation Day…. to celebrate the hard work of all our staff teams we have given all our staff their birthday off each year!

Our children wouldn’t have the amazing experiences they do if it wasn’t for our wonderful teams so to be able to give them this as a reward is really special.

We have also received some amazing Day Nurseries.co.uk reviews over the last few weeks which have been wonderful to receive too so a HUGE thank you to all our families for their kind words.

One of the things that our nursery families mention to us very regularly is ‘my child really won’t brush their teeth’ or ‘my child doesn’t like toothbrushing at all’ so we have been thinking about lots of different ways we can help you with this at nursery.

We do a number of activities across our seven settings related to promoting oral health and trying to encourage children and their families to make it a habit as part of their daily routine to brush their teeth twice a day but also to help educate our children and families about health eating and drinking and the impact this can have on a child’s growing teeth too.

Here are two visual aids we use at nursery for our families which we have found a help to promote daily brushing, twice a day for two minutes each time!

Stories are so so important and introducing them from birth and even when baby is still in your tummy is key to your child’s academic future and has multiple benefits. The main reason for this is that reading is at the heart of all formal education.

Stories and introducing vocab and a language rich environment to our children is reflected throughout our room environments from our baby to pre-school rooms. A story can come to life in so many forms so a child can feel they are part of the stories journey. They can continue it throughout their play, when they go home that day and beyond as stories have so many branches that they can evolve into.

Here are some examples of how books we have enjoyed with our children have evolved into many different forms to bring magic and wonder to a children’s life long learning.

It is coming to that time of year again where we start to gather lots of lovely messages from our staff and parents to award a staff member from each of our seven Cliffe House settings as their EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR!

This is a really important award for our team members as it signifies all their passion, hard work and inspiration they have shown to our children and their teams throughout the year so we would ask all our parents to remember to contribute too as it means an awful lot to our staff teams to get votes from their nursery families!

Here are our last years, 2020, winners!

VICKI – PUDSEY – SUE-BRAMHOPE- NICOLA – SHIPLEY – ZOE-FEATHERBANK – OCEAN – BURLEY – AIMEE – BAILDON – JADE – TRINITY

Our newest setting in Pudsey has enabled us to create a training workshop room for all our seven Cliffe House teams. As we are really embracing a more holistic, natural approach to our learning and enabling environments we have found it extremely useful to be able to create examples of our areas of provision for our teams to come to see. As you can see form the below images, the resources are open ended in their approach, often being real life objects you would use daily at home and this enables the children to think more critically, problem solve through challenge and extension opportunities and also be active in how they learn and develop.

We are also using the workshop room as a place to host mini first aid sessions for our Cliffe House parents in the new year. This will give parents a two hour mini first aid session where they will learn the basic emergency first aid techniques to help them be better equip if a first aid need with little ones occurred.