Benenden Preschool

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are incredibly happy, settled and confident in the nurturing and stimulating pre-school. The rooms are filled with sounds of happy laughter and children talking excitedly to their friends and staff. Children are fascinated by the interesting and highly challenging learning experiences that staff carefully plan for them. For example, children independently read and follow the instructions from a banana bread recipe card and make the finished product. Children are engrossed in learning about how to complete running stitch as they sew.

Staff are outstanding role models. Children are incredibly polite and their behaviour is impeccable. They show each other inspirational levels of respect, empathy and kindness. For example, children offer support and encouragement to their friends who are building a tower bigger than them. They remind them of how to carry a chair safely and hold the chair for them so they can stand and achieve their goal. Children have an excellent understanding of healthy lifestyles. They learn about the benefits of different food groups and talk about the healthy recommended quantity for each, including carbohydrates and sugars. All children have outstanding opportunities to challenge their physical skills. For instance, they build their own highly challenging obstacles to negotiate. These include using rope swings and walking along wooden ramps at different levels and with steep gradients.

What does the early years setting do well and what does it need to do better?

• The manager and staff establish inspirational relationships with children. They gain children's implicit trust and get to know what makes them unique. Children have outstanding levels of well-being, self-worth and self-motivation. They have an incredibly positive attitude towards their learning. For example, they are resilient and persist at activities until they succeed.
• Staff include children in the daily activity plans. Children request activities and resources, and staff make these available. For example, children talk about a volcano and go on to create their own erupting volcano with complete independence. Staff support all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, to make outstanding progress.
• The manager and staff establish outstanding relationships with parents and keep them extremely well informed and involved in their children's learning. Staff routinely share training for parents to help support their children at home. For example, they recently invited parents to learn about how to develop their children's imagination. Staff create training videos to share with parents, including on ideas of how to encourage children to brush their teeth.
• All staff are extremely experienced, passionate and dedicated. They are incredibly enthusiastic to continue to build on their already impressive knowledge and skills. For example, they recently learned about the different ways to support children to develop their speech and language. As a result, children take extreme pride in adding to the 'word wall' when they learn a new word, such as 'tremendous' and 'situation, in context. All children are extremely confident to communicate. They do so in an extensive range of ways, including using sign language alongside spoken words.
• The manager and staff use incredibly effective ways to monitor closely the consistency of outstanding care and teaching that they provide children. In addition to staff observing each other interact with children, they routinely visit other settings and observe their practice. Staff use their observations to implement something new into their activity plans. The manager discusses that they intend to re-introduce more walks in the village to become an even bigger part of the community.
• Staff support children to have high levels of respect for other people's similarities and differences from around the wider world. This includes the background, languages and traditions of others. Children can say simple words and short sentences such as 'hello and 'how are you?' in languages such as Mandarin and Afrikaans. Children talk respectfully about same-gender parents and understand that different lifestyles should be valued. Staff challenge stereotypes extremely well. For instance, boys are confident to dress up in traditional female clothing.
• Staff use additional funding incredibly well to meet children's individual needs. For example, they have purchased weekly yoga and sports classes, including introducing hockey and javelin, to enhance children's experiences outdoors.