The Learning Tree Preschool

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children arrive happy and eager to start their day. Staff individually greet children and their parents as they arrive, seeking any information they may need to know to support each child's day. Staff thoughtfully plan a variety of play experiences and activities. These include children's individual interests as well as their ongoing individual stages of development. For instance, children imaginatively create their own restaurant in the home corner. Staff carefully extend this play, adding real menus and mark-making materials. Some children become customers ordering their meals, while others assume the role of waiting staff, eagerly noting down their customers' orders. These opportunities mean children are quick to immerse themselves in their play and sustain interest. Staff skilfully identify how these experiences can be extended to broaden children's learning. This supports children to make good progress in their learning.

Staff understand the importance of supporting children's emotional well-being. They build nurturing bonds with children, who confidently seek out staff for play, praise and support. Children are excited to tell staff about things of personal significance. Staff are attentive and always respond. This helps children to feel valued. Staff know children well, and as such, they are responsive to children's individual needs, including children with special educational needs and/or disabilities. Staff reinforce positive behaviour through praise and encouragement. This contributes to children's own good behaviour and the kindness they show their friends.

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

• Managers, alongside their staff, plan and provide a broad and well-balanced curriculum. Staff carefully intertwine all seven areas of learning into children's daily experiences. They personalise children's learning, providing them with meaningful experiences that appropriately challenge them. Staff know what skills children have learned and what they want to teach them next. They plan for their individual next steps, enabling them to continually strengthen their knowledge. This supports children to be successful in their learning.
• Generally, interactions children receive are of good quality. Staff understand the importance of promoting children's communication and language skills. They use a variety of methods to support children, such as repetition, gesture and picture communication systems, alongside clearly spoken words. This supports children who are not yet confident with their speech to grow into competent communicators. For children who have a broad range of vocabulary, this is further extended as staff teach them new words and their meanings, such as 'hydration' and 'moisture'. However, on occasion, staff do not always recognise when some children need more time to respond to questions and develop ideas for themselves. This does not always fully support children to develop their own thinking skills.
• Overall, staff promote and support children's behaviour well. They help children who have minor conflicts to resolve them positively and give gentle reminders of their 'golden rules'. Staff understand the importance of proactively role modelling behaviour. This contributes positively to children's own behaviour. However, at times, staff do not provide consistent guidance to help children learn about acceptable behaviours. For instance, on some occasions, staff will challenge children as they run indoors, but on other occasions, this behaviour is not challenged. This gives children mixed messages when learning right from wrong. Despite this, generally, children's behaviour is good.
• Staff seek opportunities to teach children about safety. They give explanations as to why they have asked children not to do something. This helps children to begin to understand how to keep themselves safe. However, staff do not support children's understanding of online safety when accessing devices at home. As a result, children do not learn how to keep themselves safe when accessing the internet.
• Staff provide children with an abundance of opportunities to promote their independence. For example, children relish the responsibility of taking turns to run their daily snack shop. Children are encouraged to wash their own hands. They then locate their own pictorial coin, exchanging this for their snack. Children encourage and support each other as they self-serve their own healthy snacks. This offers children superb opportunities to build on their independence, gain life skills and increase their confidence in social interactions with friends.
• All staff recognise the importance of building successful partnerships with parents. Parents speak highly of the care and learning their children receive. They particularly value the good communication they receive and the broad variety of learning opportunities on offer.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• support staff to recognise when children need more time to explore and develop ideas for themselves to challenge their thinking skills
• support staff to consistently provide the best possible support for children's growing understanding of rules and boundaries
• enhance the curriculum to provide opportunities to support children's understanding of how to keep themselves safe online.