Bow Bears Pre-School CIO

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children confidently separate from their parents. They are fully supported to settle securely through the extensive routines which are personalised to meet each family's needs. Children warmly greet their friends and enjoy trusting relationships with the enthusiastic and caring staff team.

Children happily explore the wide range of stimulating experiences on offer, moving freely between indoor and outdoor spaces. Activities are carefully planned to build on children's interests and existing skills. Children who need additional support receive this quickly and effectively. Consequently, all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), make good progress in their learning.

Children are motivated to learn as they engage in the challenging and interesting curriculum. Staff skilfully support children's ideas and extend learning as they encourage children to think and solve problems. For example, children collect sand and water to make play cement for their building area, then estimate and count quantities to create the desired consistency. All children show very good levels of concentration. They persevere and find solutions to their problems. For example, when cutting pineapple, children use a knife to cut halfway through, then snap the piece in half. They take pride in their achievements and are keen to share their successes with the staff team.

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

• The dedicated manager supports staff well-being with careful consideration. Staff morale is very high, and the staff work consistently well as a team to do the very best for the children they care for.
• Since the last inspection, the manager has improved systems to help staff develop their professional knowledge and skills. Some staff have accessed external training while others have benefited from in-house coaching and support. Overall, this leads to a consistently good quality of teaching, which is effectively used to support children to move on in their learning. The manager has plans to extend this programme to help all staff increase the quality of their interactions even further.
• The setting provides children with a suitably ambitious curriculum that builds on what children already know and can do. Staff carefully incorporate children's interests into activities and use funding effectively to help all children prepare for their next stage of learning. For example, in response to children's interest in animals, they recently organised a visitor who brought in a range of minibeasts for children to handle and explore.
• Staff skilfully weave mathematical development throughout the curriculum.
• Children measure and compare the height of the buildings they create from bricks with staff support. They independently recognise numbers up to six as they roll a dice and match the number to the physical task they have to complete.
• Strong partnerships are in place with other settings and parents. These are used successfully to identify children's starting points on entry to the setting and to support their move on to school. However, the setting does not yet consistently provide regular and detailed information about children's ongoing learning, or fully support parents to extend this at home.
• Children are confident communicators. They show increasing ability to recall past learning and share their thoughts and ideas using an extended vocabulary. Staff precisely prioritise and check every child's language level on entry. They use specific interventions to ensure that all children receive the help they need to make good progress.
• Children's behaviour is exemplary. Children of all ages have a secure understanding of the group's rules and consistently follow them. For example, children walk indoors, put toys back when they have finished with them and ask for help when they need it. Staff have an excellent understanding of how children learn to behave. They provide exceptional support to help children build skills to resolve conflicts peacefully and independently. They use clear sentences followed up with open questions to help children learn the structure of negotiation. For example, 'can you say what made you cross' and 'what can we do to make it fair for everyone?' Children show high levels of engagement and an understanding of the process and resolve situations that meet their own needs, saying, for example, 'that's a cool idea'.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• strengthen information sharing of children's progress and ways in which parents can continue learning at home
• embed the monitoring systems for staff development and use these to strengthen the quality of teaching to an even higher level.