St John's Preschool Hook

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy, settled and flourish in the highly stimulating environment. They benefit from highly impressive individual settling-in arrangements. Staff are extremely nurturing. They understand and respond swiftly to children's individual care needs. This supports children's emotional development extremely well and helps them to build secure attachments with a key person. All children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), thrive in the extremely warm and welcoming pre-school.

Children show an excellent attitude to learning. They become deeply engaged in activities and show extremely high levels of concentration. They exhibit phenomenal critical thinking skills to solve problems. For example, they explore different ways to transport water from one vessel to another. They try a range of methods, including buckets, sponges, and pipes. Older children recognise that they need to join pieces of pipe together, to make them long enough to reach. They explore different ways to make water travel through the pipe and eventually hold the pipe above their heads. When questioned why, they comment that water cannot flow uphill.

Children's behaviour is exemplary. They demonstrate exceptional levels of confidence in social situations and establish consistently high levels of respect for others. Staff have remarkably high expectations of children's conduct. They provide clear and consistent boundaries and use positive strategies to guide children's behaviour. For example, a soft toy 'watches' children throughout the session and rewards their good behaviour. Children delight in receiving stickers saying 'Charlie Chimp says well done'.

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

• The highly qualified staff use their significant knowledge and experience to create an inspirational environment. They focus on helping to support children's development across all areas of the curriculum. They are exceptionally committed to their roles and responsibilities and meticulously analyse and identify children's learning needs. As a result, children develop detailed knowledge and skills across all areas of learning. They successfully develop the skills they will need for the future.
• Staff understand children's learning extremely well. They assess their progress accurately and know what they need to learn next. They plan activities that build on children's interests and strengthen their knowledge and understanding.
• Staff interact exceptionally well with children. They engage in conversations with them to check their understanding and identify misconceptions. They use effective teaching, such as providing children with different materials, to help them to differentiate between soft and smooth. This was demonstrated when children explored shells. Children struggled to identify that one shell was smooth and hard and described it as soft. Therefore, staff provided soft dough and children explored how it felt compared to the shell. This enabled children to identify the differences between the soft dough and the smooth shell.
• Children show extremely high levels of motivation and consistently cooperate with others. For example, during role play they act out owning a car wash and take on different roles. Some children take on the part of the cashier and take payments from other children. Others wash and vacuum the cars and park them ready for their 'owners' to collect them.
• Children have excellent communication skills and competently articulate what they know. For example, they talk about technology, including laptops, lamps, and voice-activated speakers. They explain in detail what these are used for and demonstrate how they work.
• Staff are highly skilled in helping children to widen their vocabulary. They regularly introduce new words, such as 'curious', and explain to children what this means. Staff incorporate the words during discussions with children. For example, when children show an interest in shells, staff comment that they are curious to explore the different textures of the shells. Children speak with increasing confidence and fluency and consistently use new vocabulary.
• Staff share consistently high expectations for all children. They establish exceptional partnerships with parents and other professionals, such as speech and language therapists. This helps them to support children with SEND superbly. Staff regularly liaise with professionals and parents to review children's progress and set them challenging targets. Parents speak extremely highly about the wonderful staff in the pre-school.
• Leaders place top priority on staffs' ongoing professional development. They maintain a strong focus on ensuring staff can support the individual children in their care. For instance, staff working with children who are non-verbal or have limited speech have recently completed sign language training. This has enabled them to focus on developing children's communication skills more effectively, so that children are fully included in all activities.