St Thomas More Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children happily arrive at the pre-school. Staff are ready to welcome them with information about activities and resources that they know will excite them. For example, staff had themed stickers on hand, which sparked children's interest in making a fairy picture. Children, including those who are new to the pre-school, build strong relationships with their key person. This enables them to settle quickly and to promptly engage in purposeful learning experiences. Children develop good communication and language skills. For example, they showed great imaginations as they extended a conversation from a book about a spider to discussions about where he would live. This included him having a suitcase, how many socks he would need and the hats he would wear.

Children develop warm and caring friendships with other children. For example, they encourage other children to join in their imaginative play at a restaurant. They manage to organise their roles between themselves. Children develop a good understanding of what they do can affect others. Staff support this with effective techniques, such as using sand timers to help children learn to share resources. Children access a curriculum that staff plan effectively to challenge and extend each individual child's learning.

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

• Children learn to do simple tasks for themselves through effective guidance and demonstrations from staff. For example, rather than staff hanging up coats and giving out lunch boxes, they show children how to do it and help them persevere to achieve the desired outcome. Staff continually celebrate and reward children for their achievements who take great pride in their successes. This enhances children's sense of well-being.
• Children access a good range of experiences that support their enjoyment of learning. However, staff do not explore how children can access from the wealth of stored resources. This means that children cannot always choose what they want to play with to enable them to fully take the lead in their learning choices.
• The well-qualified staff team is highly skilled in building children's vocabulary throughout all activities. For example, at snack time, they not only help children to identify different fruit, but also add describing words, such as crunchy and juicy. Also, during yoga sessions, they introduce words such as walrus and iceberg. This enhances communication development as well as physical skills, including balancing.
• Children thoroughly enjoy story and singing sessions, which are purposefully targeted for each child's ability and stage of learning. Younger children take great delight in finding the pieces of fruit for the very hungry caterpillar and watch in awe as the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. Older children learn about rhyming words and see the funny side of the story.
• The manager constantly works in partnership with her staff to keep fully aware of their well-being. She ensures they have time during their working day to complete tasks, which in turn enables them to focus on the care and education of the children. Staff report that as a small team they all work together to provide high-quality care and education.
• The manager and staff continually review their practice to highlight areas where they can make well-targeted improvements. Staff receive good levels of training to build on their professionalism and increase their knowledge. This training enables staff to support the individual needs of children.
• Staff work successfully to develop and maintain effective partnerships with parents. They have found alternative ways to help parents to have an insight into daily activities, while they are unable to enter the setting due to the pandemic. Parents comment highly about the pre-school and the quality of care and education that the staff provide.
• Children learn about some celebrations from different cultures around the world. However, staff do not purposefully plan ways in which they can successfully embrace the heritage and cultural backgrounds of all the children attending. This does not fully support children's awareness of similarities and differences.
• Staff successfully seek additional support for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. They actively engage with other professionals and use their guidance to strengthen their knowledge of how to best support individual children. This enables all children to make the progress they are capable of.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• increase staff's understanding of how to embrace children's cultural backgrounds and how to plan more effectively for this
• explore further ways to enable children to access from the wide variety of resources and to select for themselves.