Senior Early Years Practitioner in Leiston

Location: Leiston

Salary: up to £28,000 per annum

Contract/Hours: Permanent / Full Time – 40 hours per week.

Closing date: Midnight on the 6th of July 2026

Benefits:

• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Professional qualifications and excellent training
• Flexible maternity, adoption, and paternity packages
• Up to 5% employer contribution and life assurance cover
• Blue Light Card eligibility with discounts at 15,000 national retailers

About the role:

As a Senior Early Years Practitioner, you’ll play a key role in the nursery’s daily routine, leading your room to deliver high quality early years education and care for all children. You will plan, implement and review engaging activities that promote learning and development in line with the EYFS, ensuring every child thrives in a safe, stimulating, and inclusive environment. In this role, you will support and guide other practitioners, model best practice, and help maintain strong, positive partnerships with parents and carers. You'll be responsible for completing accurate and up-to-date observations, assessments and records.

What you’ll be doing:

• Leading the staff within the room on providing learning programmes for individual or groups of children appropriate to their needs and developmental stages in accordance with Early Years legislation and guidance.
• Finding support for children with emerging or established special educational needs, working closely with families, staff, external agencies and professionals to ensure each child's needs are understood and met.
• Ensuring the compliance and application of nursery policies and procedures and relevant legislative requirements, informing management immediately of any instances of non-compliance or variations in practices.
• Contributing to and participating in the wider nursery management through leading on specific areas of development within the nursery, as directed by the Nursery Manager.
• Preparing and supervising dedicated areas/rooms within the setting on specific working patterns through planning, monitoring of outcomes, managing ratio of children, and the provision of a stimulating and appropriate range of activities while ensuring health and care needs are met.

What we need from you:

• Level 3 early years and childcare qualification e.g., NNEB, CACHE, NVQ Level 3 in Childcare and Education.
• A thorough knowledge of children's developmental needs from 0 to 5 years.
• Experience working and leading in an early year setting.
• Strong planning, observation and reflection of children and their learning.
• Effective communication skills across multiple age groups.
• Paediatric First Aid qualification.

About the nursery:

Located in the heart of Leiston, Spring Leiston Nursery offers a warm, calm, safe and stimulating environment for children aged 3 months to five years. A setting within a vibrant children’s centre, passionate about nurturing curiosity, confidence and creativity through play-based learning. As a Senior Practitioner, you’ll join our dynamic team, working together to support each child’s learning to ensure each day is fun and engaging.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion:

At Spring Oscars we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. We actively encourage applications from Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic and disabled candidates as they are under-represented within the organisation. We want to take deliberate and purposeful action to ensure equal opportunity to all groups. Male staff are often under-represented within this sector, and we would like to encourage more male applicants for our roles. We are committed to safer recruitment practices to protect our service users; therefore, all applicants are expected to have an understanding of and commitment to safeguarding best practice.