Green Shoots

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children form strong relationships with staff, who provide an extremely caring and reassuring approach. Children feel valued and safe in their care. Staff have high expectations of all children and create a well-balanced curriculum. They give an extremely strong focus to promoting children's personal, social and emotional well-being. Children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and those with English as an additional language (EAL), make continually good progress.

Children gain confidence from a young age to have a go in their play and they experience a great variety of activities that enhance their knowledge and skills. For example, children concentrate carefully when attempting to cut off pieces of Bath stone using real tools. They learn about keeping themselves and others safe and know they need to wear protective glasses when using the tools. Children enjoy going on a bus trip with staff into town to visit a local art gallery. They like to take a pre-school 'travel pup' toy away on holiday with them. On return, they eagerly tell their friends where they have been, such as on an aeroplane to a hot country. Children learn to be kind and helpful and play cooperatively with their friends.

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

• Leaders and staff work very well together as a team and continue to develop their professional role and skills. For example, staff have completed training that has helped them to recognise, understand and meet the individual needs of children with SEND and how to help each child to achieve in their play.
• Staff encourage children's communication and language very well, including those children with EAL. Staff work closely with parents to promote children's language skills at home and in pre-school. Older children use words well to describe their ideas. For example, they find a wood louse outdoors and let it crawl across their hand. They tell staff, 'It feels tickly'. Younger children gain confidence and begin to follow simple instructions and form two- and- three-word sentences.
• Children use their imaginations very well in play. They enjoy making pretend meals for staff and offer them a 'cup of coffee' and 'piece of toast'. They remind staff to be careful and say, 'Your drink might be hot.' Children enjoy putting on a show and sing their favourite nursery rhymes. They proudly give a bow when their friends enthusiastically clap their hands in appreciation.
• Leaders and staff are very reflective of their practice. They continually assess how the play environment is helping children and have rearranged the layout of areas where children sit for story times. This has helped to create a calmer area and encouraged more children to access books independently.
• Children enjoy counting and begin to use numbers of personal significance. They tell staff, 'I'm four and I'm strong.' They sometimes represent numbers using their fingers. However, although staff make good use of opportunities for children to count, they do not always reinforce this with the written number shape. For example, to help children develop their number recognition skills and link written numbers to quantity.
• Staff are highly skilled at helping children develop an extremely good sense of identity and self-worth. They talk with children about what makes them and their friends unique. Children say their friend has sparkly eyes or a very special smile. Staff plan extremely enriching experiences, such as cultural days, to help children learn, and become accepting of similarities and differences between their lives and those of others. For example, they are keen to try food from other countries that parents have cooked. They thoroughly enjoy visiting a nearby care home with staff, where they sing songs and read stories with the residents.
• Children develop enjoyment of physical play and gain very good control of their bodies. For example, they learn how to relax doing simple yoga positions, or enthusiastically join in with belly dancing activities. They have great fun doing star jumps, stamping like an elephant or shuffling like a gorilla.
• Leaders and staff continually monitor children's progress. They identify children's next steps of development and plan activities to encourage their curiosity and interest. However, at times, staff do not organise some group activities as well as possible to maximise children's learning. For example, to enable all children to participate individually and follow the sequence of making play dough.
• Partnerships with parents are strong. Staff value and support every family. They are keen for parents to be fully involved in their children's learning. Parents comment that staff are very supportive and keep good communication with them about their children's achievements.
• Staff use frequent praise and encouragement, which helps children develop very good self-esteem. Children recognise their 'golden rules', such as to use their 'listening ears' and 'inside voices' when playing with their friends.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• make more use of opportunities for children to understand about linking number and quantity and develop aspects of their early mathematical awareness further
• review and strengthen the organisation of group activities to maximise learning opportunities for children.