Castle Fields Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff warmly greet children and parents on arrival. Due to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, parents can no longer come into the pre-school. They say goodbye at the main gate. Familiar staff are there to help distract and settle the children. This supports children to feel safe and secure.

Children show delight in playing freely outdoors. They enjoy going on nature walks to the nearby field and search for living things using magnifying glasses. Children closely examine insects such as butterflies and slugs. They discuss the similarities between slugs and snails. Children collect blackberries from bushes to take back to the pre-school. This supports their understanding of the world around them and helps those children who learn best from being outside to do so.

Children confidently select from a wide variety of inviting activities that are fun and inspire them to have a go. Staff skilfully engage with and build on children's interests, helping them to develop a positive attitude to learning. Children show increasing skills in counting. For example, they practise counting to five when rescuing small toy people from pretend fires. Staff use these opportunities to teach simple mathematical concepts such as one more and one less.

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

• Children have the opportunity to be physically active. Younger children learn to identify and manage risks appropriately with minimal support from staff. They learn to climb and slide on the apparatus. Children learn how to keep themselves safe.
• Staff encourage younger children's language development as they read books together. Staff model new words as they point out familiar characters in the illustrations. They make sure that books are available both inside and outdoors for children to access. This helps to promote children's literacy and their love of books.
• Children behave well and are confident. They learn to take turns and share the resources. When children want to play with the same toy as their friends and become upset, staff sensitively help them to understand and manage their emotions. Children are supported to identify feelings and look at strategies to help them regulate these. For example, staff talk to children about how animals show their anger and how they learn to control this. Children have formed strong friendships and learn to share, cooperate and resolve conflicts calmly.
• The manager has high expectations of all children. Staff follow the children's interests, helping them to make independent choices. Staff monitor the learning and development of each child and set appropriate next steps. As a result, children make good progress from their starting points. However, staff do not always know how best to engage children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) to ensure they receive equal learning experiences. The use of additional funding is planned well to ensure children's individual learning needs are met.
• Parents comment positively about the setting. They feel that their children are making good progress, particularly with speech and language. They reflect on the changes the COVID-19 pandemic has had, particularly around how they drop off their children and how they have less opportunity to talk with their child's key person. The manager has started to look at ways to strengthen communication with parents, for example through the use of a secure online platform where they can share observations and photographs from the pre-school and parents can add comments from home.
• Children's independence skills are nurtured well within the pre-school. They confidently look for their name cards, as they self-register on arrival. Staff encourage children to 'have a go' when trying to complete tasks for themselves. Children demonstrate their self-care skills as they put on their coats and change their clothes. Toys and resources are stored to enable children to select for themselves, further promoting their independence and confidence.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• further improve staff's knowledge around how to support and engage children with SEND, to help them to make even better progress
• further develop the sharing of information between children's key person and parents, to enable parents to continue their children's learning at home.