Buttons@Wavendon Gate

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children enjoy an extensive range of highly stimulating activities. The exceptionally professional, enthusiastic staff team place children at the centre of all that they do. Buttons pre-school aims to support local families in a truly inclusive way and staff mentor and develop each child to ensure they achieve the best that they can be. The owner is adamant that the pre-school will provide whatever support a family needs so that no child goes without. For example, during the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, management and staff kept in close touch with families to deliver extra food and learning resources.

Children learn rapidly in this beacon of excellence, which is a safe haven for them. They develop high levels of confidence and self-esteem, learning to manage their own needs independently and expressing their creativity freely. Children use fresh flowers and vegetables from the role-play shop to extend their play in different activities around the hall. Children learn excellent social skills and behave exceptionally well.

Children form close bonds with staff. They run to warmly hug their key person or eagerly climb onto the manager's lap for a special conversation on the toy telephone. The owner and her management team have the highest expectations for all children regardless of background and foster a culture of trust amongst the families of the children who attend.

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

• The pre-school is owned by a highly experienced and dynamic leader. Her senior management team ensure that staff benefit from ample internal and external training opportunities. Staff well-being is a high priority and the regular well-being circle meetings ensure that everyone routinely offers support to a colleague who is not feeling their best. The new manager is benefitting from a thorough and generous induction programme. Staff teaching skills improve consistently and this means that children make rapid progress in their learning.
• When staff identify a need within a family likely to have a negative impact upon the well-being of a child, the staff provide the necessary advice or equipment to help to resolve that issue. Consequently, parents report extremely strong and effective partnerships and high levels of trust in the pre-school, its staff and management. Parents receive regular information about their children's progress via an online platform. Key persons actively encourage parents to share information from home. This contributes to children receiving a highly consistent approach to their care needs and learning.
• Children with special educational needs and/or disabilities are supported exceptionally well. The staff work tirelessly to secure early interventions. They help children to learn that everyone is different, and children show care and concern for each other. Children develop high levels of self-control and perseverance when encountering difficulties, such as using a visual time line. Staff are always nearby to sensitively support their attempts, encourage their successes and praise their achievements.
• The curriculum is coherently arranged to sequence children's knowledge and skills for their future learning. A garden activity extends on children's earlier sensory experiences exploring herbal teas. Children make potions using coloured water, herbs, soap, flower petals, jelly and coloured foam. Staff ask open questions to promote conversation and encourage children to count the petals being added, 'one more' and 'one less'. Children use mathematical language for capacity, such as 'full' and 'empty', as they pour their potions into vases.
• Forest school sessions challenge children to prepare the ingredients for the 'Gruffalo's' tea. They squat and kneel at the tuff spot tray in the garden to peel and chop carrots, onions, broccoli, kiwi, limes and potatoes, using peelers, knives and scissors. Staff encourage children to use new vocabulary and extend language. For example, a child asks, 'what are the black bits coming out of the kiwi?' The teacher links this to what the child already knows about an apple.
• Children are totally immersed in their purposeful play. They choose what they do and whether they play indoors or out. They readily respond to the 'Clap hands and wriggle your fingers' song. This signals changes in the daily routine and children quickly help to tidy activities, or move to small group sessions or to sit for lunch.
• Staff take small groups of children out of the main session to offer targeted support for those with speech and language difficulties or listening and attention issues. Children divide into age groups for story time so that the chosen book is suitable for their stage of development. Older children take part in short phonics sessions in readiness for school.
• Children follow a pictorial recipe to count and measure ingredients to make their own play dough. Using the context of one of their favourite stories, children make their blue dough into aliens with coloured matchsticks, pipe cleaners and googly eyes. They creatively stick the play dough onto their foreheads, pushing the googly eyes into the dough and become aliens who dance around the hall.
• Children relish the music and movement sessions where they expend energy dancing to 'Baby shark' or run, jump and jog to a familiar tune. Children have free flow access to the outdoor space to practise their physical skills.
• Following their interests, children explore plastic dinosaurs in the 'Dinosaur swamp home'. Using non-fiction books staff help children to identify and pronounce challenging words, such as 'Euoplocephalus' and 'Petaceratops'. Children say that the dinosaur is 'a great stocky dinosaur, built like a tank and covered with spiky armour'.