St Paulinus Pre School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children successfully develop their communication and language skills. They listen with enjoyment to stories and learn new words. Staff use different ways to support children's communication skills, such as signing and picture cards. This helps children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), to communicate their needs and understand what is coming next.

Children enjoy the many opportunities staff provide to enhance their physical skills. For example, they build their large-muscle strength as they practise climbing the steps to the slide. Additionally, they strengthen smaller muscles in their hands when they cut out shapes in play dough.

Staff help to develop children's social skills and encourage them to share and take turns. This is demonstrated when children queue patiently for their turn on the climbing frame. Children enjoy their time at pre-school. They build strong friendships and enjoy being together. This is reflected in their good behaviour.

Staff positively enhance children's literacy skills. For instance, children enjoy using brushes and paint to make marks on paper. This promotes their early writing abilities. Furthermore, children demonstrate how they recognise their name on their coat pegs, which prepares them well for the eventual move to school.

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

• Staff plan an inviting environment that considers the interests of children. For example, children with younger siblings in the family develop their imaginations and language skills as they feed and dress baby dolls in the role-play area.
• Staff teach children about their local community. For example, they talk to children about buildings in the town as they play with cars on a roadway playmat. However, staff are less successful at teaching children about the wider world. This means children do not always learn about different people living in communities beyond their own.
• Staff use assessment well to monitor children's progress and identify any emerging gaps in their development, which they share with parents. Additionally, they suggest ideas to parents on how to extend their child's learning at home.
• Staff work closely with parents and specialist services to plan strategies to help children with SEND. They use targeted plans to support how they adapt their practice so that the needs of children with SEND are met.
• Staff give consistent messages about their high expectations of children. They closely supervise children and manage occasional minor disagreements effectively. Staff talk to children about how their actions make others feel and model the expected behaviours. This helps children to learn how to self-regulate their emotions. Furthermore, staff successfully support children to learn about their feelings. They use a range of ways, such as sharing stories and picture prompts to help children understand how they are feeling.
• Staff have strong, warm bonds with children. They give them lots of positive feedback, which supports children's self-esteem well. For example, children are proud of themselves when staff praise them for pouring their own drink.
• Staff support children to develop their independence skills, such as when they wash their own dishes after mealtimes. However, during some routines, children get distracted by other activities taking place, such as children queueing to wash their hands during group singing sessions. This means children's learning is sometimes disrupted.
• Leaders ensure additional funding the setting receives is spent in a range of ways to meet the individual needs of children. For example, they have recently purchased resources to improve children's communication and language skills in readiness for starting school.
• Parents are highly complementary about the education their children receive. They praise the efforts staff go to in order to help them find any extra support they may need.
• Leaders monitor staff practice to help them identify any areas for improvement. Staff complete training and share new knowledge with their colleagues to ensure good quality teaching.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• develop the curriculum to help children learn about other people and communities different from their own
• review and strengthen the organisation of routines to minimise unnecessary disturbance to children's learning.