St Andrew's Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children arrive at pre-school extremely keen to start their play and learning. They promptly settle to the activities and remain completely engrossed and engaged in learning throughout their day. They move freely around, making independent choices about where they would like to play and who with. Children develop extremely strong friendships with both children and staff. Children can often be found playing together and helping each other to clear away resources spilt on the floor. Staff readily offer cuddles to children and children only require very limited support to resolve any minor conflicts. Children's behaviour is excellent. There is a clear learning intention for all activities that staff plan, to ensure that no matter the age or ability of children, they all receive effective levels of challenge. For example, younger children explore the colours and shapes of the fruits and vegetables, and older children learn to sort them by colour and use money to buy items.

Children show exceptional skill in following the design drawings for building different structures from the building blocks. They locate the corresponding colours and shapes and succeed in building. Children talk with staff about the colours, sizes, and shapes of the blocks, using words, such as 'diamond', to describe them. Children show immense excitement at the anticipation of pulling up the carrots that they have grown. Staff help children to recall how they planted the seeds, what they needed to grow and what they think they will look like. They all join in the excitement of finding a carrot and then talk at length about the shapes, sizes, and numbers of carrots they have grown.

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

• The manager has an exceptional understanding of how to support her highly qualified staff team to plan for what children need to learn next. The team have an excellent knowledge of the sequence of learning and how each child learns in their own ways and at their own rate. Subsequently, the planning of activities, the environment and children's learning are extremely individualised and offers children challenge they need.
• The manager has an excellent and working knowledge of how to observe and assess staff's practice and skills. She completes regular observations of staff during their interactions with children and links this with setting targets and training. This helps leaders to make highly effective improvements, enabling staff to gain additional skills and children to gain the most learning.
• All staff have an in-depth knowledge of each child's levels of development and what they need to learn next. Staff are, therefore, able to make the very most of their interactions with children to challenge and to extend learning consistently. For example, when exploring play dough staff know which children they can challenge with simple addition and those they can begin to talk with about fractions. This enhances children's awareness of mathematics to exceptional levels for their age.
• Staff enable children to develop very high levels of confidence and independence. They offer consistent and highly effective encouragement to children to help each other, such as finding another's water bottle and helping to ask staff for items for their friends. Children are extremely kind and considerate to their friends, offering up their chair without hesitation for others to enable them to sit together.
• Staff make highly effective use of the information they gain from parents. This enables them to provide an exceptionally inclusive setting and additional experiences to enhance children's awareness even further. Subsequently, children make the best possible developmental progress.
• Children learn about growth and nature through an extensive range of activities and experiences staff provide. Children use the language they have learned through effective teaching to explain the life cycle of frogs and butterflies. They learn about how seeds germinate. They tend their plants and then harvest the carrots. Staff extend this learning further, such as setting out the role-play area as a farmers' market, where young children excitedly identify an 'aubergine'.
• There are excellent partnerships with parents and children's wider family. Parents comment about the exceptional team ethos and the consistency of staff who 'go the extra mile' to support families. Parents receive a wealth of information about the educational programme and the excellent support for children moving on to school. Parents comment about the exceptional and consistent staff team and explain how they have enabled their children to 'thrive'.
• There is exceptional provision for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. There are excellent systems in place for ensuring that staff with responsibility for supporting parents and staff have very high levels of support. Staff work with the team, parents, and other professionals to ensure the earliest identification of gaps in children's development. This cohesive approach enables staff to generate highly individualised learning plans, aiding in gaining additional funding and swiftly closing the gaps.
• Leaders have a have an excellent understanding of their roles and responsibilities. They work with the whole staff team to enable an effective working environment that is exceptionally supportive. Staff report that there is an exceptional team ethos, where they receive a wealth of support for their development and well-being.