Little Gems Pre-school

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy to come to the pre-school. They greet the staff as they arrive and eagerly share their news. Children know to hang up their bags and coats, and they separate with ease from their parents. Staff provide a welcoming environment that encourages children to settle quickly into playing with their friends.

Staff work well as a team to implement the curriculum and provide effective support. They promote children's language and communication well, build on their social and emotional development and encourage their physical skills. Staff encourage children, through using their interests and repetition of activities, to build on their learning further. For example, children enjoy finding 'diamond' gems in coloured sand and moulding the sand to 'space rocks'. They discuss how the aliens and spacemen are also in the sand and 'fly' them around the raised tray in their 'flying saucer'. Children tell how they are enacting a favourite song.

Staff follow children's interests and demonstrate the strong bonds they have with them. Children's personal independence skills are fostered well. They behave well, have good self-esteem and readily take turns and share with each other. Staff are enthusiastic and enjoy interacting with the children, encouraging them to persevere at activities and develop resilience. Children, including children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), are making good progress in their learning.

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

• The management team is very supportive of its staff. They all work well as a team and hold regular discussions about the children. This assists staff in having a clear understanding of children's next steps in learning and enables them to identify and share when these have been achieved. This cohesive approach enables them all to focus on what skills children are aiming to learn next. It is also effective at ensuring a consistent approach to implementing strategies to support those children with emerging or identified needs.
• Staff have regular discussions with the management, as well as supervision meetings. These talks help identify training opportunities, reflect on well-being and enable the needs of children and practice in general to be discussed. Staff talk about how recent training or observations of other professionals working with children have made them consider how they ask questions, display children's creative work and support their speech development. These experiences all assist staff in supporting children to make the best progress they can while in their care.
• Staff understand the importance of enabling all children to develop at their own rates, and that they all have unique ways of learning. Children with medical needs and/or SEND receive extremely good care. Management and staff work in close partnership with other agencies to support children's ongoing developmental needs.
• Staff provide an exciting and well-resourced learning environment using their knowledge of children's developmental needs and interests. Outdoors, children enjoy constructing with rubber bricks, natural materials and creating obstacle courses. Children's imagination blooms as they play in the mud kitchen and use hobby horses to move around. Indoors, they manipulate play dough, sand and art materials. Children enjoy creating 'Humpy Dumpty' and his wall with paint and stickers, using bricks as a tool to print with. However, occasionally during the session, children lose interest in what they are doing in some resourced areas or do not use them. At these times, staff are not consistent in encouraging children to refocus their attention or demonstrating the benefits of playing in these areas. Doing so would inspire children to further build on their skills and learning.
• Children demonstrate good imaginations and enjoy playing together. For example, they pretend to be in the office making notes and taking orders, then become doctors treating patients for broken bones and illnesses. Children relish being in the garden. They delight at the few snowflakes that fall, pour and scoop in the water tray and use a variety of different materials to make meaningful marks in the soil or on different surfaces. They gain a love of books and enjoy listening to stories and singing along with staff. These activities encourage them to build on their skills and enable them to express themselves.
• Partnerships with parents are a strength of the pre-school. Parents state they value the way the staff care for their children and the progress their children have made while attending. They talk about the online sharing of photos and information. However, this information does not always inform parents about the learning purpose of activities or share with them the ethos of the nursery or curriculum, therefore not providing sufficient information to assist parents to meaningfully build on their children's learning at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• further support staff to adapt their teaching strategies to enable them to encourage children to refocus their attention more effectively and engage with resources more fully
• share more focused information with parents about children's learning to enable them to be more informed about the purpose of activities and to assist them in continuing their children's learning at home.