Mini Buddies – About Us
A very warm welcome to Mini Buddies Nursery
Mini Buddies is a small, family-run early years setting based within Manor Beach Primary School. Owned and led by Jack Parkes, an experienced Early Years Professional with over 18 years of expertise, Mini Buddies offers a nurturing, highly engaging environment where children are cared for, challenged, and inspired every day.
At Mini Buddies, we believe that early childhood should be filled with joy, curiosity and meaningful experiences. Our carefully designed environment, rich curriculum and dedicated team create a space where every child can flourish – emotionally, socially and academically.
Our Values and Principles
- To care and be considerate to others
- To listen when others are talking
- To speak politely using good English
- Tell the truth at all times
- To use good table manners and eat with etiquette
- To try our best and achieve to the best of our ability
- To embrace new challenges
- To share and take turns
Our Mission Statement
“For all children to have a sense of belonging and to feel valued and cared for in a secure, happy and nurturing environment”
Our Ethos
At Mini Buddies we have enormous respect for children and for their capacity to instigate, test and maintain curiosity in the world around them. We believe in children’s right to play; the right to access the outdoors (and in particular our beautiful coastline); the right to access risk and the vibrant reality of the natural world; and the right to experience a healthy range of emotions, through all the challenges of social interaction, to build a resilience that will enable continued and creative engagement with their peers and aspire to reach their full learning potential.
Ofsted Setting Reference Number: 2787873
Ofsted Report: Link
Parent Partnership
At Mini buddies we understand that parents are their child’s main educator and we aim to work alongside parents to ensure the needs of the child are best met. For this reason we offer:
- Informal chats – Daily feedback can be obtained verbally through personalised meet and greeting times at the beginning and end of sessions.
- Home Link Books – For parent’s that do not drop of or pick up children we use ‘home link books’ to keep parents and practitioner up to date with the children’s development.
- Formal Parent Evenings – We also hold two parent evenings per year to seek the views of parents and discuss the development of their child.
- Questionnaires – We also use parent’s questionnaires and a suggestion box.
- WOW Sheets – We have ‘Wow’ sheets for parents to complete.
- Community Breakfast Sessions – We hold a community breakfast sessions once every term where parents and children are invited to join us for breakfast to get to know us better and have informal chats with us and other parents
- Parenting courses, school readiness meetings – We recognise being a parent as well as being the most amazing experience can also be a very challenging and exhausting job. To aid our parents we work closely with our local children centre to ensure we offer courses and advice for all parents.
We do consider our rapport with parents to be a significant strength of the setting as recognised in past inspections although we continually reflect on how this can be improved further.
