Tamar Valley Preschool

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The provision is good

Children excitedly arrive at pre-school and happily separate from their parents and carers. They immediately explore activities and greet their friends. Staff welcome children with warmth and care, and children clearly feel safe and settled.

Children are enthusiastic learners. Staff play alongside children, developing their skills and listening to their ideas. Staff have high expectations of the children, and positive behaviour is promoted well.

Children behave exceptionally well and show such care towards each other. Staff model language well. They introduce new vocabulary and help children to learn new words.
.../>For example, staff teach children words to support categorising, and children enjoy sorting objects into 'soft' or 'hard'.Children's knowledge of the world is effectively developed through frequent outings and visits to the pre-school from people who help others in the community, such as firefighters and ambulance crew. Children develop a sense of belonging by taking part in community events in the village.

For example, to celebrate world kindness day, children went for a walk in the village and enjoyed giving flowers to older members of the community.

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

The pre-school is led by managers who have a wealth of knowledge of the children in their care and how to best support them to progress. Staff have exceptional knowledge of every child and what they know and can do.

With passion and their professional knowledge of child development, staff build on this through a carefully considered and well-sequenced curriculum that is delivered in a way that results in children's levels of interest and engagement far exceeding that expected for their age.The pre-school is managed by a committee who have oversight of the setting. They share responsibilities for management roles, such as finance, funding and staff well-being.

The committee and pre-school staff are proactive in liaising with the local authority and leaders in the community to best support the pre-school to offer consistent, quality and effectively led early years provision. The committee have not ensured they fully completed the process for notifying Ofsted of changes to committee members. They are now aware of the process to follow in future.

This has not had an impact on children's safety.Staff know the importance of supporting children to persevere with challenges and try and succeed with activities independently before asking for help. Staff observe children when they encounter difficulty and support them where needed.

Children have time to solve problems in their play, such as making purple with the paints. They are adaptive and resilient and feel pride in their success. Staff praise children's efforts and celebrate the beautiful shade of purple they create.

Staff are well supported and coached by the managers, for example through supervision meetings, training and staff meetings. Professional development of staff is purposeful and enables them to support the learning and development of all children. For example, staff have recently completed a course on recognising and supporting neurodiversity in children, and they have already put their new learning into practice to support high-quality interactions for all children.

Staff have an excellent knowledge of how children grow and develop. They recognise that younger children need to be able to move around and are less likely to want to sit together for group story times, for example. Younger children enjoy investigating magnetic building blocks while older children listen to a story together.

This helps all children to be able to access learning that supports progress. Children's learning is well supported overall. However, the physical development curriculum does not support all children to access learning opportunities to develop balance, whole body control and coordination, and core stability.

Staff support children to develop early mathematics skills as they play. Children explore measure and number as they count the number of spoons needed to fill a bowl with porridge. Staff revise numbers with children as they play with a toy till, for example.

They increase understanding of sorting and comparing as they play with different-sized bears.Partnerships with parents are strong. Parents speak of how happy they are with the care of their children.

They feel the strength of the pre-school is the friendly staff team who know their children well and support them to feel settled, happy and eager to learn. Parents feel well informed about activities children have enjoyed each day through effective handover discussions and through photos shared. However, parents are not consistently informed about children's next steps in learning so they can best support progress at home.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.There is an open and positive culture around safeguarding that puts children's interests first.

What does the setting need to do to improve?

To further improve the quality of the early years provision, the provider should: develop strategies for regularly sharing next steps in children's learning with parents so that children receive consistent support to extend their learning further at home nenhance the curriculum for physical development so all children have regular opportunities to engage in activities that build gross motor skills, balance, stability, core strength and control.