Broad Street Cygnets

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children arrive at the setting incredibly happy, confident and independent. From the start, they display impeccable manners and excellent learning attitudes. After their morning self-register gathering, children make independent choices on their place of learning and the activities they want to access. For example, children choose whether to play in the role-play room, art and craft room or outdoors. They are profoundly engrossed and motivated to learn throughout the day. The staff know the children and their families exceptionally well. Children display a great sense of belonging, and even those who recently joined the setting have settled in incredibly well.

Staff excel in providing rich and stimulating experiences for children that spark their interests and bring up their talents beyond what they experience at home. Children have high levels of enjoyment and excitement and have outstanding levels of confidence and resilience. Staff use incredibly playful and meaningful interactions with children, initiating exciting narratives for their play. For example, children dress up as firefighters and find hidden fires in a forest, put them out, look for injured people and return to their fire engines ready to receive another '999' call. Children have important jobs assigned to them in their play. Together, they create solutions to challenging riddles and negotiate a choice of resources effectively to extend their play further.

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

• The curriculum is structured and sequenced exceptionally well, ensuring there are no gaps in children's learning and development. Staff plan their teaching according to children's interests and developmental stages, emphasising exciting narratives and providing challenging tasks for children. All children, including children with special educational needs and/or disabilities, make tremendous progress in all areas of education. For example, when children returned after the COVID-19 pandemic, children with speech and language delays were identified promptly. Practitioners created intervention plans to ensure children were provided with one-to-one professional support. All children returned to the expected levels of development in all areas of learning.
• Children have enriching conversations with their peers about recent events in their community, and they are proud to share their achievements with the inspector. Children's language and communication skills are commendable. Children use a wide range of rich vocabulary and correct language structures.
• The praiseworthy ethos of the setting is fully embedded in the staff's daily teaching and interactions. Managers recognise their staff as the most significant asset in delivering excellent education to children and acting as outstanding role models in implementing three values: kindness, sharing and helping. The ethos is cascaded to all the children and becomes a part of the daily routine. Children's behaviour is exceptional and considerate. For example, one child reminds another to be kind and helpful to other children.
• Managers act with integrity, ensuring that all children have full access to education and going the extra mile for families who need additional support. The setting is at the heart of the local community and is actively involved in promoting community activities. For example, children prepared artwork promoting their love of books for the local library.
• The staff's partnership with parents is highly effective. Many parents positively comment on the setting being an integral and essential part of the community. They praise the management's commendable effort in supporting the local community. Parents are regularly invited to contribute to community events and fundraising with the local schools. They attend regular parent evenings and discuss children's progress termly. Parents feel that staff are experts who they turn to with any issue they might have.
• Children learn positional language and mathematical concepts through stories and role-play games. For example, children organise a pet show competition and decide whose puppy will win and whose will come second and third. Children learn to recognise numbers through exciting activities, such as experiments with launching rockets, looking at and comparing rockets' heights and estimating how many 'fuel tablets' they will need to make a rocket fly higher. After the experiments, they create another play where they act as astronauts who drive a rocket to the moon, remembering to get to its orbit first.