A PRIVATE Bury nursery is celebrating success after being rated as “outstanding” following an Ofsted inspection.

The owner of the Wellington Villa Nursery has paid tribute to her “fantastic” staffing team for helping achieve the top grade.

Miss Nina Johnson has run the Bolton Road nursery for the past 10 years, employing 11 staff and catering for 58 children, aged up to 10.

Wellington Villa has been rated as “outstanding” in terms of meeting the needs of the range of children, its early years provision, to the well-being of children and the effectiveness of the leadership and management.

Ofsted inspector Mr Gary Kirkley stated: “All children make excellent progress towards challenging individual goals that are built around their individual needs as they make rapid progress towards the early learning goals.

“The quality of teaching is excellent, with staff skilfully using their expert knowledge of the areas of learning and a clear understanding of how children learn, to provide rich and imaginative experiences for all.

“As a result of excellent teaching, all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities and those with speech and language needs, make excellent progress relative to their starting points.

“Children who have been unable to experience success in other settings have flourished here and developed much confidence and strong social skills.”

Mr Kirkley added: “The extensive links with other agencies, the local authority and the parents and carers themselves, demonstrate highly effective early inter-vention, superb decision-making and, as a consequence, an extremely positive impact on children’s learning.

“The nursery has shown over a sustained period of time the ability to offer a wealth of help and support to children with special educational needs and/or disabilities and their families. Some parents travel distance to place their child in the nursery.”

The inspection also found that staff put safeguarding at the heart of everything they do Miss Johnson said: “I bought the nursery as a growing business 10 years ago. I’m just over the moon that we’ve been rated outstanding.

"Myself and my deputy have done our early years degree and we’re involved in continued early years professional development.”