Ravensthorpe Community Childcare

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy and thrive in this welcoming and inviting setting. They show incredibly positive attitudes towards their learning and a desire to investigate their surroundings. Children confidently engage in a wide range of stimulating experiences that have been chosen to ignite their curiosity, awe and wonder. They form exceptionally strong bonds with staff, which helps them to feel safe and secure. Children are independent and self-assured individuals who have good social and communication skills. They are keen to share their experiences and demonstrate their knowledge and skills. For example, children show the inspector how to make a sandcastle following the instructions they have been taught by staff. Staff have extremely high expectations for children's learning. The curriculum is meticulously planned and sequenced so that all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, make excellent progress across all areas of learning.

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

• Partnerships with parents are excellent. Managers and staff build close relationships with all families who access the setting. They provide a welcoming and friendly place where parents can come for advice and support. Staff regularly host information evenings for parents to help them to enhance children's learning at home. For example, parents have attended workshops about healthy eating, toilet training and supporting children to be independent.
• Staff successfully work alongside parents to assess what children already know, understand and can do when they join the setting. They carefully consider what they want children to learn next and plan the environment and experiences accordingly. Staff incorporate children's interests into the activities on offer to help them to engage and focus.
• Highly effective strategies are in place to support children's communication and language development. Staff are extremely well trained and highly skilled at supporting children to become confident communicators.
• Children demonstrate good listening and attention skills during group activities. Older children choose their favourite songs and sing them together. Afterwards, children have the opportunity to sing out loud to their peers. This helps to build their confidence and self-esteem. Younger children engage in small-group activities that provide them with opportunities to listen to and follow instructions. They use their bodies to pull and stretch a piece of material in different directions.
• Stories, books and rhymes are used successfully to support children's communication, language and literacy skills. Staff animatedly read familiar stories to children, using props to bring them to life. Children are engaged and join in with phrases from the story. For example, they say, 'Run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm a gingerbread man.' Children recap what happens in the story and are able to identify the title and author of the book.
• Staff interact positively with children as they play alongside them. They extend children's knowledge and skills through commenting and asking questions. For example, when playing in the mud kitchen, staff encourage children to count how many mud balls they have made and introduce simple addition and subtraction problems to challenge the most able children.
• Children are incredibly active and have access to fresh air every day. Staff carefully consider what skills they want children to develop in the outdoor space. Additional funding is used successfully to provide children with more resources to enhance and challenge their physical skills. The manager has plans in place to further develop the outdoor space to promote children's understanding of nature and wildlife even more.
• Transitions to school are seamless. Staff have excellent relationships with the local school. They successfully help children to move to school, using a range of strategies. For example, teachers visit children in the setting and staff share information about children's personalities and their learning.
• The manager is knowledgeable, experienced and passionate. She shares her expertise with staff to help them to develop their practice. The manager closely monitors staff performance. She provides rigorous training, coaching and mentoring so that all staff demonstrate impeccably high teaching skills.