Sunny Corner Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children, including the many children who have recently started to attend, arrive at the pre-school excited and ready to learn. They settle quickly on arrival, due to staff understanding their interests well and reflecting these in the activities they have set up. Children play happily together. They feel safe and are emotionally secure because staff welcome them individually and create a caring and nurturing environment. Children learn to be considerate of each other and to behave well. They are confident to explore and experiment, such as when mixing the cornflour and water to make 'gloop'. Children are confident to communicate with their friends and with staff, as staff support children's language development well and introduce new vocabulary as they play. For example, older children make up games and stories with their friends, showing a good understanding of how to use language in their play.

Children achieve well as staff plan a broad curriculum that, overall, reflects children's individual learning needs. This includes those children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. Staff have a good understanding of the next steps in children's learning. This helps them to provide activities that introduce children to new ideas and allows them to build on what they already know.

Initially, during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, the pre-school was open only to the families of key workers. Staff used private social media platforms to provide parents with ideas for activities. They shared links to early years learning websites, so that parents could continue to support children's learning at home. This helped to ensure that children continued to receive support for their learning. As a result, when children returned to the pre-school, staff were quickly able to build on children's learning again.

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

• Staff provide a broad range of activities that capture children's interests and motivate them to learn. Occasionally, managers do not organise routines as well as possible to allow all children to play and learn in the way they prefer. For example, outdoor play areas are only accessible at certain times during the day, even though staff recognise that some children learn better when playing outdoors.
• Children receive very good support for their communication and language skills. Throughout the play areas, staff busily engage children in discussions. They introduce them to new vocabulary and encourage them to talk about their experiences. For example, when playing in the boat, children discuss their own trips to the beach and eating ice-creams.
• Information-sharing with parents is successful. Parents report that they receive detailed information about children's experiences and progress. They comment that the level of detail in this information shows how well staff understand children's personalities and characters. Staff use what they know about children to help them feel safe and secure. For example, they distract children with a favourite activity if they become upset.
• Children understand rules and boundaries and receive lots of praise for following these. Staff are quick to manage any disagreements, helping children to learn how to share and take turns. This helps to create a calm and well-organised environment, where children can relax.
• Staff teach children how to keep themselves healthy. Children discuss the benefits of a healthy diet as they help to chop up their fresh fruit at snack time. When staff announce that the snack table is open, older children spontaneously go to the bathroom to wash their hands. This demonstrates their good understanding of positive hygiene routines.
• Children are confident and develop strong relationships with staff and with their peers. Staff are always close by to provide comfort and reassurance when children need this.
• Staff respond well to children's keen interest in books. Children demonstrate what they have learned and remembered as they recall parts of their favourite stories. For example, they use the wooden-spoon puppets to retell the story about a monster in the woods. They show increasing concentration as they listen to pre-recorded stories, following the story using the pictures in the shared book.
• Staff receive good support from leaders and managers to help them develop their own skills and knowledge. Thorough inductions, frequent staff meetings and staff supervision sessions help to ensure that staff understand their individual responsibilities well.
• Staff share detailed information about children's development with schoolteachers, to help them plan for children's continued progress when they start school. However, pre-school leaders are not sufficiently aware of how successful they have been in preparing children for school to be able to use this information to help them continually improve on the effectiveness of the curriculum. For example, they do not gather information about the progress of children after they have moved on to school.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• increase opportunities for children to choose to use outdoor areas to further extend the development of those children who learn better outside
• develop further strategies to review the success of the curriculum in preparing children for school.