Hanbury Kindergarten

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The provision is outstanding

Children benefit from excellent learning experiences. Staff are highly skilled in ensuring every moment is a teachable moment.

For example, children listen intently to stories, which staff pace carefully and read expressively. Children are very happy and sustain high levels of engagement and curiosity as they play. With support from staff, children expertly use tablet computers to look at different commercial logos that they recognise.

This helps to broaden their understanding and awareness of how letters and words represent meaning. Children form exceedingly strong attachments to their dedicated and devoted key... staff. These highly successful bonds help children to feel safe, and as a consequence, settle rapidly into the tranquil environment.

Children embrace staff's high expectations of them. For example, when completing a number jigsaw, they eagerly follow staff instructions to count and check the number of animals before connecting the pieces. Equally, children complete number jigsaws with great precision on their own.

Children behave exceptionally well and show great consideration for the environment. They help to tidy away at the end of a session and ask for a brush to sweep up any mess. Children respect the gentle and patient staff, who help them to understand the feelings of others.

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

The manager and deputy manager are passionate about providing the best quality service to children and their families. They continually evaluate all areas of the kindergarten and value parents' and children's views. Consultation with parents has resulted in management keeping the highly valued written learning records, rather than transferring to online records.

Staff ensure children receive opportunities that link to their individual next steps and interests across the whole curriculum, which helps to secure very good progress. For example, staff help children to learn about polar animals and extend the subject to African animals. This evolves to learning about farming and farm animals, which links more directly to children's personal experiences.

Staff have a deep understanding about how to support children's emotional well-being and sense of belonging. For instance, the newly introduced family tree presents photographs of children and their families. This has a superb impact on helping children develop their own identity and to respect the similarities and differences between each other.

Staff naturally delve into children's lives to find out what is important to them. They use this information to enhance children's learning and development. Staff are highly perceptive to children's needs and ensure they develop the skills they require to succeed in life.

For example, staff consistently show a great interest in what children have to say and equally engage them in high-quality, interesting conversations. This contributes greatly to children feeling confident to speak and be heard.Staff know children and their interests exceptionally well.

They develop highly interesting and varied activities to ignite children's enjoyment, curiosity, and imagination. For instance, children delight in helping staff to create different textures to make a farm scape. They pretend to be farmers, with toy tractors, artificial grass, real hay, pebbles, logs, and sticks.

Staff expectations of children are exceptionally high. They always stand back and let children do things for themselves. Children of all ages put on their shoes and coats with little or no help.

Children let off steam outdoors, running and chasing. Staff respectfully allow children to take calculated risks. They diligently and discreetly watch children climb confidently on the equipment.

Inspirational staff help children to build an interest in literacy and a love of books. Children enthusiastically interact with stories, such as 'Oliver's Milkshake'. Highly confident children can recall the context of books they have listened to.

They expertly recall what they need to do to make a milkshake with real fruit. Staff skilfully introduce interesting new words such as scrummy, fruity and frothy.Parents are extremely complimentary about the kindergarten.

They say that they are constantly amazed by the progress their children make. They give examples of children, from a young age, writing their name, knowing letters and recognising numbers. Furthermore, parents speak highly of the staff, who appreciate family situations and help children to cope with these in a highly positive way.

The small staff team work extremely well together. They regularly discuss practice and learning activities. The manager understands the benefits of individual meetings with staff to enhance practice.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.The manager and staff have excellent understanding of their safeguarding responsibilities. They know the steps they must take should they have concerns about a child or the staff team.

Robust policies and procedures are in place to ensure everyone is aware of their responsibilities to keep children safe and secure. Although the turnover of staff is exceptionally low, the manager demonstrates she would follow a rigorous recruitment procedure. This helps to ensure that staff who work with children are suitable to do so.

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