Hillcrest - Northern Counties Nursery

About Hillcrest Nursery

What Services Do We Provide?

We provide a high quality Integrated Day Nursery for able bodied children and children with special educational needs on the Northern Counties campus site. The nursery provides places for children aged three months to four years who have complex needs requiring specialist support as well as able-bodied children from the local community.

The nursery is based within spacious accommodation and has easy access to secure soft play and out door play areas. Children with special educational needs have access to the excellent hydrotherapy pool in the main school. The nursery is divided into three areas for babies aged three months to two years, two to three year olds and a preschool section. As you would expect we have a very well developed child centred philosophy. We apply a simple rule to judge the quality of our service — if it is not be good enough for our own children then it is not good enough for others. We have high expectations of the children and our staff and we monitor standards to ensure that they are kept high. In addition the nursery provides a school for parents service for children with sensory / communication difficulties. An information service is based within the nursery to provide support to parents who may be faced with additional difficulties in gaining services for their children. This service runs specific courses for parents and carers to help them understand their children’s difficulties and the range of solutions that are available to address them. Parents are put in touch with one another in order to establish an informal network of support. We provide activities and courses for all parents to enable them to get the best out of school by providing information on teaching strategies.

So why did we want to set up this new service?

• This is a new service based at Northern Counties School
• It is a unique integrated nursery service
• It is available for families from within the local community
• It has been specifically planned to meet the needs of parents who have disabled children
• It enables us to provides a wide range of respite services for families - including day care and holiday provision
• It makes use of the specialist expertise of Northern Counties and Percy Hedley Schools
• It provides nursing and therapy support
• It provides a caring service for the whole community