Kennford Playbox

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Summary of key findings for parents

This provision is outstanding • Leadership and management are inspirational.

Leaders and managers continuously look for ways to enhance the quality of care and education. For example, they make alterations to the outside play areas, including well-resourced water walls with guttering and funnels, mud kitchen, sand shed, digging areas and climbing wall, which provide rich and stimulating experiences for children every day. • The manager is an excellent role model for all staff.

As a skilled practitioner, she shares her expertise and regularly monitors the quality of the provision. She provides focused feedback to improve staff's practice, as well as tailored training and ...development to secure further improvements. All children make very good and often rapid progress from their starting points.

• Staff use their skilful knowledge to further enhance opportunities. They use excellent questioning skills to help children expand ideas, building on what they already know. For example, children climb on to the wooden apparatus and decide 'to be pirates and look for treasure'.

Staff dress up and fully participate in the story. They lead the children outside using dance and songs to hide the treasure. Children excitedly extend their ideas, as they quickly return indoors and find paper to draw their treasure maps.

They draw lines to follow, pictures of volcanoes and tell staff 'x marks the spot'. • Children use and apply their knowledge, understanding and skills very well. For example, they build walls with large foam bricks, outside on the ground in the rain.

Staff skilfully use the opportunity to reinforce counting and simple calculations. Children discover the wet bricks will stick to the acrylic windows and enthusiastically build higher walls. They confidently describe the patterns they create with the bricks, using excellent mathematical language, such as 'taller', 'one more' and 'rectangle'.

• Staff support children with special educational needs and/or disabilities extremely well. For example, highly focused one-to-one intervention improves children's speech and language development. As a result, children make exceptional progress in their communication skills from below average starting points.