I still disagree about written language. You'll be writing a lot of policies that have to be clearly understood, as well as reports to other bodies, references, etc etc.
Anyway,
Good staff. First, second and thirdly you need good staff. It doesn't matter what ideas you have if the people responsible for putting them into practice are poor, the nursery will be poor. There will be times when you need to fill a position but all the people who apply are poor to average. Do you give one the job or do you keep paying £15 per hour for supply staff and hope to find a better person?
Good staff like to work with other good staff. Employ poor ones and the good ones will start leaving. Some managers ask "why do the good ones leave?". Answer, because they can. Good staff can get other work easily. There are loads of positions and few great members of staff so they will go where they get paid more, conditions are better and they can do what they love, childcare, without hassle.
Fourthly, those good staff want to do good work. Help them. I worked in a nursery that had a welly bucket. The children would go there and take their shoes off and get their wellies. Except they couldn't. The bucket was too deep and full. Because of that a member of staff had to stay by the bucket and help the children find their wellies for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon. A welly rack would have cost £100 for a big enough one. Expensive? Paying the member of staff £8 per hour, 5 hours per week, over 3 months of wet winter days costs about £450.
But it's not the waste of money that irritated me the most with that system. It was the fact a good, trained member of staff was spending an hour a day doing the job of a piece of furniture instead of helping children to hold a pencil, read books, encouraging a child to try a new experience, etc.
Help staff do the job they love easily. Can children hang up and fetch their own coats themselves? Many nurseries' pegs are so crowded they can't do it themselves which means a member of staff spends an hour a day, etc etc.
Is all the art stuff easy to get to, or is the paper stacked so you have to spend half an hour un-piling and re-piling it up to get a single sheet of blue paper?
Do you have an electric pencil sharpener? Means more time with the children.
And talking of pencils, one of my tips for parents looking for a good nursery is to check to see if the pencils are useable. They get forgotten so easily. Yes, nice varied areas around the nursery is good, but are the areas set up and really useable for the children? The areas need to be evaluated constantly to make sure the standard of them doesn't slip. Is there ALWAYS paint in the pots? Is there ALWAYS sand in the sandpits? Are the books ALWAYS in good condition without torn out or missing pages? It's the basics. And it's the basics like those that matter to the children who are trying to use the nursery.
And regular doughnuts for staff. 