Teatimers

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Staff form loving, nurturing and respectful relationships with children in their care. They are compassionate and responsive to children's care needs. Children readily approach staff when they need help or reassurance. Staff successfully promote children's emotional well-being and independence. Children show impressive skills when they put on their coats and outdoor shoes. Staff role model and talk through each stage of trickier tasks, such as doing up coat zips. Older children try hard to follow these instructions and smile proudly when they succeed. Staff are fair and consistent in their high expectations of children's behaviour. Children respond with clear understanding of the rules and well-established routines of the day. This helps to create a calm and productive atmosphere.

Leaders and staff create a vibrant and inviting learning environment for children. They provide a rich and varied curriculum, inside and outside, based on children's interests and ideas. Staff arrange resources for children to access independently. Children cleverly remember and apply their previous knowledge to build on new learning experiences. For example, in their imaginative play, they work collaboratively with their friends to make an erupting volcano with sand. Children demonstrate good knowledge of facts when they describe the lava as very hot and dangerous. They decide to overcome this challenge and talk about special lava boots to ensure safety. This illustrates the good progress children make.

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

• The senior managers are intently focused on providing a pre-school that is at the heart of the community. As dedicated leaders, they actively involve staff, parents, and children in their ongoing reflection for continual improvements. They work well with staff, observing them as they interact with children and then provide constructive feedback on individual staff's practice. They regularly meet with staff to discuss their roles and mutually agree on their professional development needs. Staff say they feel valued and well-supported. This helps to maintain a strong and cohesive team.
• Senior leaders and staff offer a language-rich environment. They consistently model new words to help extend children's vocabulary. In addition, staff are quick to identify specific children who display speech delay. A dedicated member of the staff team successfully supports these children through targeted interventions on a one-to-one basis. Children with English as an additional language also show good progress in their language acquisition with similar strategies. All children become confident communicators.
• Staff effectively develop children's love for books. For instance, they use props associated with the story to help bring them to life. Children eagerly shout out familiar repeat phrases from the story as staff read to them. This is evident when younger children listen to the story of 'Dear Zoo', and call out, 'they sent him back' at the end of each page of the book.
• Staff develop children's physical skills in a range of ways. For instance, when outdoors, children balance on ramps they make with planks of wood and manoeuvre with great control on scooters. This helps to strengthen their large-muscle skills. Staff provide other activities, such as tongs for children to pick up smaller objects, and pipettes for children to collect and transport water. In this way, children develop their small-muscle skills, which can help them hold writing equipment correctly to make more precise marks.
• Overall, staff interact well with children. They observe children as they play with their friends or independently. Most staff then carefully consider when to intervene to extend children's learning further. For example, in the outdoor kitchen role play area, children use real items to make 'flower soup'. Staff encourage them to think logically about the sequence of events to make the soup. However, on occasions, some staff frequently interrupt children's play and ask too many questions in quick succession. At these times, children lose focus and become disengaged.
• Staff support children to learn about different cultural festivals, such as Chinese New Year. However, they are not always proactive in promoting the different cultural traditions and home languages of children who attend the pre-school. This means children do not fully benefit from opportunities to explore similarities and differences between their own ways of life and those of others.
• Parents are highly complimentary about the kind and caring staff at the pre-school. Staff work in partnership with parents to support children's learning at home. For example, they share home-learning ideas with parents through daily feedback and regular progress meetings. This helps to support continuity in children's learning and development.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support all staff to recognise when to allow children to continue with their play without interruption, and when to intervene with more purpose
• provide further opportunities to celebrate children's backgrounds, cultures and languages to help them make comparisons between their own way of life and those of others.