Welcome to the Erskine Stewart Melville Nursery
Erskine Stewart Melville Nursery is a happy place to be, with highly qualified staff who nurture children as individuals and offer extraordinary opportunities to help them discover their unique potential.
The ethos in our Nursery, for 3 and 4 year olds, is vibrant, creative, and hands-on. We ignite each child’s imagination and curiosity through play-based activities that inspire creativity, foster critical thinking, and nurture their independence. Every day is an adventure, as children explore, discover, and grow in an environment designed to spark joy and encourage them to think for themselves while having endless fun.
1140
Free Council Funded Hours for eligible families
4
Fulltime Qualified Class Teachers
36
PE, Music and Digital Learning Specialist lessons each week
40
Acres of outdoor space
14
Bee-bots being enjoyed at home each week
228
Nursery Bedtime stories available to borrow
The most important thing is our children's happiness. If children are not happy, they'll not learn. Along with our excellent staff ratios, many families choose Erskine Stewart Melville because of the wealth of opportunities on offer.
Rhona Watt
Head of Nursery
Attachment Led Nursery
Our three and four-year-olds spend their days exploring our beautiful grounds and having fun in light and airy playrooms. We are an attachment led Nursery where close relationships are formed between our staff and children. We believe that no child is ordinary, so we take the time to get to know each and every one of them, helping them to discover their own individual interests and talents.
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Highly Qualified Staff
Together our staff inspire our children to become confident young people with good hearts and strong values. Each of our pre-school Nursery rooms have their own qualified teacher, and the children also benefit from our Junior School teachers on site for Music, Digital Learning, PE, Library and Forest Kindergarten lessons.
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Our Wellbeing Programme
We put wellbeing at the centre of everything we do because we know that when children feel happy, safe and secure they are far more likely to thrive.
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Outdoor Learning
At Erskine Stewart Melville, outdoor learning begins in Nursery because it is so important for child development. Find out more about our fully qualified Forest Kindergarten Leaders and how we develop confidence, problem solving, resilience and teamwork in the great outdoors.
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Flexible Wraparound Care
Our wraparound care provides a balance of structured and free play for your child, before and after Nursery, and during the holidays, meaning you can be covered for nearly 50 weeks of the year.
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What Our Families Say
1140 Council Funded Hours
We are in partnership with the City of Edinburgh Council, which gives eligible parents living within the boundary of the City of Edinburgh, the opportunity to benefit from 1140 hours of Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) funding a year. This equates to 30 hours of funded childcare a week, during term time, from 8.15am to 2.45pm, Monday – Friday and includes a hot lunch in our bespoke early years dining facility. The funding can be accessed for the term starting after your child’s third birthday but cannot be used for our wraparound care provision.
There are some caveats to the funding, and we are not permitted to offer new funded places to children who are, or whose parents are subject to immigration control. For families who do not qualify for funding, we offer a special, subsidised fee model for our Nursery provision.
An Environment that Enriches and Inspires Learning
In addition to our bright, airy playrooms there are several other spaces to support our children and inspire their learning. Our sensory and nurture rooms stimulate the senses with their cloud lighting, bubble tubes, fibre optic spaghetti lights, mirror pebbles and light boxes.
Children learn to climb trees and enjoy sledging down our hill, in the winter. Running tracks, astro pitches and long jump pits are all available to our youngest children who love to watch the older children and try to copy their performances. Children also enjoy visiting our purpose built Early Years Library, Digital Learning spaces and PE halls. The allotment, digging pit, mud kitchen and trails are also firm favourites with our youngest children.
