Welcome to Buttercups, a Forest Pre-School rated Good by Ofsted (March 2022) for children aged between 2 and 5 years old, based in Bursledon, Southampton.
Caring for and nurturing your children is the foundation of everything we do at Buttercups, but we are not just a ‘childcare’ setting. We are a small team of highly experienced, highly qualified Early Years and Forest School educators who work to assist your children to become physically robust, well-socialised, caring, literate and numerate young people.
We achieve this through broadening your child’s experience of the world, and encouraging them to explore their thoughts, feelings and observations about what they have experienced. Whether it is sunny, raining or snowy, we take our children out into the surrounding countryside to enable them to learn from their experiences in the natural and built environment that surrounds them. We don’t sit children down and try to educate them, instead we stimulate their interests and allow them to explore their discoveries for themselves. Whether it is figuring out what a road sign means, discussing why we need grit bins, or studying the life cycles within a pond (or a puddle!) over the year, Buttercups children learn for themselves and that powerful, instinctive ability to learn stays with them as they grow and develop.
Through spending the majority of their time with us exploring the outside environment, children develop physical co-ordination and robustness, learn the value of teamwork and appreciate that we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and in so doing come to realise that a team of people with all their variety can solve problems much more effectively than a single individual. After spending two years with us, Buttercups children are ready to thrive at school.
We are a very small setting, with up to 16 children each day being cared for by 4 adults. Having such a low ratio of children to adults allows us to dedicate all our attention to what is happening in the moment, and to share the thrill of discovery with them.
Because we are such a small setting, spaces are very limited and we always have waiting lists for our Government subsidised and self-funded spaces.
For those using subsidised places, we accept up to 15 hours of 3-4 year-old funding each week. We are not part of the 30 hours scheme, and though we have 2 year-olds at Buttercups we cannot offer subsidised places to 2 year-old children. We make small additional charges to cover the cost of consumables and equipment.
Full details of everything we do, and our current fees, can be found in our Welcome Pack. Email us and we will send you the most recent version.
The best way to see exactly what we do and to help you decide if the Buttercups experience would be beneficial to your child, is to view our gallery… After that, you can arrange a visit and see what we do for yourselves.