Caldecote Preschool

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are sociable, confident explorers, who enjoy their time in the warm and welcoming pre-school. They enthusiastically follow their interests and are keen to build on what they already know and understand. Children listen to the explanations staff provide, helping them find out about the world around them. While they listen to staff and their friends, children find new words to help them expand their vocabularies. Children who speak English as an additional language are delighted to hear words in the language they use at home, through an electronic device. This helps them feel valued in the pre-school. Staff use visual aids to help children settle and become familiar with the routines of the day. This contributes to children's growing confidence. Children's emotional well-being is central to the well planned curriculum the manager and her team facilitate for all children.

Children gravitate to the inviting activities and areas that staff carefully position. Staff use their skills to introduce different aspects of the curriculum to children. For example, children lay under a clear water tray, watching the reflections created by the sun. They emerge, motivated to move the water with their hands. Staff encourage them to find coloured numerals in the tray, asking them if they recognise the numbers. When children are unsure, staff hold up their fingers relating to the number, allowing children to count and make links with the numeral. This helps to support children's mathematical skills.

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

• Children with special educational needs and/or disabilities are very well supported. Staff maintain strong working relationships with other professionals and organisations who also work with the children. Between them, they share information and individual plans to help support children's development and education. Dedicated members of staff help to ensure that children play and learn in ways that suit their levels of development. They spend time helping children repeat favoured activities, while introducing new words and concepts that build on what children already know.
• Managers spend any additional funding they receive for individual children appropriately. They take into account the immediate needs of the children to help meet their unique learning and developmental needs. As a result, all children make good progress.
• Parents speak very highly of the manager and her team. They feel that staff listen to them and are supportive, giving them advice and information to support the whole family. Parents say they are confident that children make good progress in the pre-school.
• The dedicated staff are supported to develop their own knowledge through continued professional development. They share ideas and information they gather through training courses and workshops with their colleagues during team meetings. This helps to maintain a consistently good quality of education throughout the pre-school. Trustees, who have a leadership responsibility, regularly meet with the manager. This helps to ensure that all statutory requirements are met.
• Children behave well. They quickly learn that they can independently use resources, such as sand timers, to help them resolve minor disputes around sharing and taking turns. Staff give children gentle reminders about the simple rules, such as where they can safely run. This contributes to the generally harmonious environment in which children thrive.
• Through their observations of children, staff identify interests and themes they can build on to help support children's learning. For example, children look at books about pirates after they have dressed up in costumes and rummaged for treasure in sand. Children's interests trigger their desire to find out more and build on what they already know and understand. However, at times staff do not effectively identify when to add more challenge to children's self-chosen play to help to move learning to a new level. As a result, older children sometimes become distracted and less engaged with purposeful activity.
• Staff work well with parents. They share information about children's learning, giving them ideas for activities they can do at home to help support children's progress. When children first start in the pre-school, staff find out about children's likes, routines and key information, such as allergies and general health. However, staff do not gather sufficient information about what children can already do or know to help plan the next steps in children's learning right from the start.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support staff to identify when and how to add more focused challenge to children's self-chosen play and explorations to help maintain children's engagement in purposeful activity
• gather even more initial information about what children already know and understand to help identify next steps in learning right from the start.