Micklands Pre-School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The provision is good

The committed and enthusiastic manager and staff provide a welcoming and nurturing environment.

Children feel safe, secure and have a positive attitude to learning. Staff act as good role models. They provide guidance and strategies to promote children's positive behaviour.

Children behave very well and show high levels of respect for the staff, the environment and their peers. They are self-assured, develop good social skills and show high levels of emotional well-being.Managers and staff have high expectations.

They have a desire to provide all children, including those with special educational needs and/or ...disabilities (SEND) and those learning English as an additional language, with a high-quality provision. Regular assessments enable them to identify individual children's learning needs and recognise any emerging gaps in their progress. This allows them to provide targeted support to help children to progress.

Staff provide a good range of activities that promote children's enjoyment and learning effectively. Children respond positively to staff interactions and are eager to explore, investigate and find things out. However, staff do not fully support children to develop resilience and confidence in their own abilities.

They sometimes intervene too quickly, and do not allow children time to think and find solutions independently.

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

The well-established key person system promotes children's emotional well-being and helps them to form secure attachments. Staff complete home visits prior to children starting.

This enables them to meet with parents to find out about children's unique characteristics and what they enjoy.The manager and staff are committed to their roles and responsibilities. They have high expectations for every child and have developed a curriculum based on children's interests and what they need to learn next.

They complete regular observations of children and use their spontaneous interests to promote their learning further. For instance, they use children's interest in ice to encourage them to explore how this feels and how ice is formed. Children identify that ice feels cold and is produced when water freezes.

Partnerships with parents are strong. The manager and staff offer a good range of initiatives to engage, support and build on parents' interest in their children's development. They regularly discuss children's progress with them and provide resources, including books, to encourage parents to support children's learning at home.

Children are keen to engage with staff and take part in activities. This is illustrated when they become engrossed in role play and act out familiar experiences, including preparing meals. They use natural resources, including flowers and leaves to extend their play.

Staff support children's language development by asking them to identify the different smells.Children enjoy the time they spend outdoors. Staff encourage them to take appropriate risks and challenges to support their physical and emotional health.

For instance, children show pride in their achievements as they balance on tyres, beams and wobbly logs.Children have access to a good variety of books and easily accessible writing resources. They listen with interest to stories and confidently predict what will happen next.

During their play, they act out familiar stories, such as being the big bad wolf and building houses for the pigs.Children use mathematics during their everyday play and demonstrate a good understanding of the resources they need to explore measurement. For example, in the garden, they use an extendable tape measure to measure different items.

The ambitious manager makes good use of appraisals to provide staff with regular feedback on their performance. However, the arrangements for ongoing supervision of staff are not strong enough to clearly identify how individual staff can raise the quality of their practice to the highest level. For instance, staff do not always allow children time to think and respond to questions, and occasionally miss opportunities to encourage them to solve problems independently.

Staff give clear and consistent messages to children that support healthy choices around food and exercise. However, they do not consistently implement procedures effectively around personal hygiene, particularly teaching children the importance of washing their hands before mealtimes.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.

Leaders ensure that staff keep their safeguarding knowledge up to date. Staff are aware of their roles and responsibilities in keeping children safe. They complete regular training, as well as discussions during staff meetings, to help them to recognise the signs that might indicate a child is at risk of harm.

Robust recruitment procedures ensure that adults working with children are suitable. The premises are safe and secure, and children are continuously supervised to keep them safe in the environment.

What does the setting need to do to improve?

To further improve the quality of the early years provision, the provider should: continue to build on children's confidence in their own abilities, to help them to develop resilience and find solutions to problems independently refine staff supervision and monitoring to identify precisely any individual development needs, to help each member of staff raise their quality of teaching to the highest level make the best of opportunities that arise to teach children about the importance of following good hygiene practices, as part of leading a healthy lifestyle.

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