Treehouse Pre-School

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are making exceptional progress in their learning. Staff provide a vast amount of well-targeted and highly effective support for individual children's needs. They use information from parents, and other carers involved in children's lives, to provide experiences that truly support children's emotional well-being, interests and next steps in their learning. Children are motivated to use their preferred style of learning through the staff's positive engagement and interactions. This helps to increase their opportunities to develop further skills. For example, staff play alongside children making 'potions', using their knowledge of children's intrigue with mixing and experimenting to support their confidence to use their voice. This also helps to develop their physical skills to bend, stretch and pour and mix.

Children have an extremely strong and positive attitude to their ongoing learning. Staff provide a stimulating, vibrant and creative play environment, both indoors and outdoors, to spark children's imaginations, curiosity and intrigue. Children are determined to make the play go their way. Staff use their engagement to enhance children's participation to extend their confidence to question, be critical thinkers and solve problems. This results in children sustaining their interest in activities and play for long periods. Staff successfully stretch and extend their play according to their level of understanding.

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

• Children with special educational needs and/or disabilities receive substantial support to help close gaps in their development. Staff work dynamically alongside other professionals to provide strong, consistent approaches to children's learning. For example, staff adapt successful strategies used to support previous children's speech and language while waiting for referrals to specialists. They work extremely closely with parents to promote consistent practices at home. This results in significant improvements in children's confidence to use their voice and the words that they know.
• The management team goes above and beyond to support everyone involved in the care and development of children. There is a positive culture within the staff team to continuously strive to improve experiences for children and their families. This helps to promote the absolute best opportunities for children to learn and develop.
• Every child's unique character and experiences are used to strengthen areas that they need to develop further. Children make clear, confident decisions as to where to play and how to play. Staff use their unmistakably strong knowledge of each child to guide children's play in well-thought-out experiences to help them to learn to their full potential.
• Parents make significantly positive comments about the support they receive from all staff as well as the exceptional progress their children are making. Their opinions are highly valued by staff to assess the effectiveness of their partnership and how this can be adapted for each family and their particular needs. For example, staff give purposeful support when parents apply for funding to guide them through the process to promote children's ongoing learning and care.
• Managers make exceptional use of additional funding for individual children. They go above and beyond to provide parents with ideas as to how to continually promote children's experiences out of the setting. For example, management buy bus passes for families to enable them to give children different learning experiences during school holidays to ensure they continue to progress when the setting is closed.
• All children are given the individual support they need to develop their communication and language skills. For example, children who speak English as an additional language receive considerate interactions to extensively support their confidence to express themselves through key home-language words, expressions and gestures. Staff give children time to absorb information in their home language, the use of visual aids and simple English statements. Children use this time to develop the skills to use both languages successfully in their play and to express their needs. Parents give high praise to the staff for the levels of respect for children's heritage.
• Children's emotional well-being is extremely highly promoted to give children an exceptional sense of safety and security. Children run into the provision, showing excitement and comfort when greeted by their familiar key person, especially when they have been through very recent difficult circumstances. Staff use their interactions meticulously to thoroughly support children's feelings and relationships with others.
• Staff listen respectfully to children's voices and use these opinions to optimise their confidence to explore new and exciting experiences. For example, staff use children's interest in the boat in the garden to introduce mark making through imaginative play of driving to the shops by making a shopping list together.