Poperinghe Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children eagerly arrive at this warm and welcoming pre-school. Staff greet them with wide smiles and contagious enthusiasm. This supports highly successful transitions resulting in children settling happily and swiftly. Children keenly share home languages, experiences and celebrations with staff and their friends. They are gaining a wonderful understanding and respect for everyone within their community. Staff form excellent relationships with children, who demonstrate high levels of emotional well-being and a strong sense of belonging.

The manager and staff are highly successful at providing an inclusive environment and have high aspirations for all children. For example, additional staff are employed to assist children with special educational needs/and or disabilities (SEND) to support equal access to learning experiences. Skilled practitioners use purposeful questioning skills and model ambitious vocabulary choices. Consequently, children are absorbed within a language-rich environment which supports good communication and language progress.

Children take part in a wide range of engaging learning experiences and freely flow between activities, inside and out. For instance, they attend forest school with great excitement. Children enjoy learning about and exploring the natural environment while developing their creative and imaginative skills. For instance, they enjoy making collages on hessian with feathers and other natural resources, and re-enacting stories among the trees. Children are actively encouraged to develop their interests and talents. For example, children that enjoy creative role play are offered boxes and props to create a space rocket. Staff join the children's play, skilfully modelling new vocabulary choices and extending their learning opportunities by adding the names and characteristics of planets.

Children behave very well. Staff are excellent role models and are highly successful at supporting children to make positive behavioural choices. Children receive consistent support to help them understand right from wrong and treat each other with respect and kindness. For example, when creating play dough aliens, children offer one another scissors and other tools and take time to complement each other's work. Children are exceptionally kind and considerate.

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

• Throughout the pre-school, staff support children's speaking and listening skills well. They help children to use correct pronunciations and model advanced vocabulary choices. For example, when children were looking for bugs beneath logs and playing hide-and-seek, the words 'eroding' and 'camouflaged' were introduced and explained. Children are developing strong communication skills.
• Staff keenly celebrate the diverse nature of the pre-school. Children learn about and celebrate festivals from around the globe with costumes, dancing and different foods to sample, including an autumn festival celebrated in Nepal. Staff take time to learn new words and phrases from children's home languages, which the children enjoy sharing. In addition to the children gaining an excellent understanding of the wider world, they are also discovering what makes them and their friends wonderfully unique.
• Since the last inspection, the manager and her team have worked hard to promote children's problem-solving and independence skills. Staff consistently encourage children to think for themselves and work through solutions independently. Children demonstrate high levels of perseverance and are developing into confident, resilient learners.
• The hands-on manager is passionate and knowledgeable. She supports and leads her team effectively and is a role model for staff and children. The manager has a clear and ambitious vision for the pre-school and is dedicated to continually reviewing and improving practice. Time is allocated for staff to attend regular training opportunities to develop their skills further. Consequently, children benefit from the enhanced interactions these opportunities provide.
• Children with SEND are supported exceptionally well. The senior team work hard to access additional funding, to provide resources to support any additional needs a child may have. This includes funding for a private speech and language therapist. Staff have reorganised rooms to provide quiet spaces for children that find busier environments overwhelming. The manager and special educational needs coordinator work closely with parents and other professionals. Together, they create targeted support plans to promote good rates of progress for all.
• Staff have established a broad and stimulating curriculum. A wealth of additional activities that enrich children's learning are provided. For example, they benefit from reptile encounters, hatching eggs, taking caterpillars home and a well-resourced forestry area with a fire pit. Staff have a good knowledge of what children already know and what they can already do. However, at times, children's next steps across all areas are not explicitly planned for. Consequently, at times, some children are not making the very best rates of progress in some areas.
• Children have many opportunities to be physically active on climbing frames, balance beams and ride-on toys. They understand the need for good hygiene practices such as washing their hands before eating. Children enjoy discussing which foods are healthy and unhealthy during mealtimes. They are gaining a good understanding of how to lead a healthy lifestyle.
• Parents are very complimentary about the pre-school, making comments such as, 'we are genuinely very impressed!' and 'we cannot fault it!' Regular communication enables parents to gain an insight into their children's experiences at pre-school and provides advice about how to support children's learning at home.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• further strengthen staff's abilities to precisely identify next steps for children's learning across all areas to help them make even more progress.