Minety Pre-School CIC

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children benefit from a welcoming and nurturing environment. Staff greet children happily as they arrive ready for their day at pre-school. They make time to talk to parents, where needed, to ensure they are happy leaving their children. Children develop positive relationships with all staff. Staff know what children like and create a safe and secure learning environment for them to explore. Children are confident and well settled.

Leaders have worked hard since the previous inspection to create a broad and ambitious curriculum that they centre around the children's interests and learning needs. Children have recently developed an interest in things that go 'up'. Staff use this interest to create exciting and meaningful learning opportunities for the children to explore this further. For example, children use magnetic bricks to create large structures, and they use their imaginations and critical thinking skills. Some children make tall towers, and others make houses for their toy animals. Supporting staff ask children how they can make their structure bigger and what shapes might make it stronger.

Staff work effectively to ensure that children with additional learning needs are very well supported. Staff quickly identify any gaps in development. They work closely with parents and external agencies to ensure that children get the support they need. While staff await advice from external agencies, they implement strategies to support children and provide an inclusive curriculum for them. For example, staff use objects of reference to support children's understanding of routine activities. They remove lids from pens to ensure they are accessible for children and model how to draw lines and circles on paper. Children copy and beam with delight when they achieve.

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

• Leaders have worked with their team to improve arrangements for effective support to help staff successfully fulfil their roles and deliver good teaching. The team meets regularly to discuss children's development and identify any gaps in learning and the strategies that can be used to close them. Staff are offered training to support their key children's needs. For example, leaders are seeking Makaton training for staff to support communication for those children who need it. They have also identified that many children struggle to regulate their emotions upon starting, so they have introduced strategies and resources, including 'The Colour Monster', to support this. Staff report that they are well supported and feel valued as team members.
• Leaders design a curriculum to help develop and extend all areas of learning. Staff create opportunities for children to practise many of these skills. For example, staff create a sensory activity with shaving foam and resources to explore. Children develop the small muscles in their hands when they squeeze and scoop the foam with their hands. They talk to their friends about the towers they build with the blocks and the pictures they make with their fingers. However, in the winter months, access to the garden is limited due to sudden changes in the weather. Staff do not always use alternative strategies to promote large physical movements, such as balancing and climbing. Therefore, children do not have consistent opportunities to build physical confidence or practise and develop these skills even further.
• Children display good behaviour. They are respectful of their environment and their peers. Staff generally provide children with expectations for behaviour. However, at times, such as when children run indoors or climb on low ledges, staff remind them not to run or not to climb but do not explain why this is important. Children repeat these actions, as staff do not consistently make them aware of the impact their actions may have on themselves or others around them.
• Staff promote children's communication and language skills effectively. They are excellent role models for language. They speak to children and members of the team with respect. Staff foster children's love of books and have created a warm and cosy quiet space with a range of texts for children to access. Staff enthusiastically read children a book about Christmas, and children snuggle up with staff and listen intently. When children hear new words like 'perplexed', they show an interest in the meaning. Staff talk to children about new words in an age-appropriate way to keep children interested. Children benefit from learning new vocabulary and meaningful interactions.
• Partnerships with parents are very good. Parents say that the staff are kind, inclusive and support the whole family unit. Leaders provide families with termly updates so they know what their children are learning and how they can continue their children's learning at home. Children and families are very well supported.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• provide children with consistent opportunities to develop and practise their large physical movements to enable them to become physically confident and ready for their next stage
• use effective strategies consistently to support children to understand the impact their actions may have on themselves and others around them.