St Peter’s Preschool

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

The provision is outstanding

The experienced manager and her team of professional staff place children at the heart of everything they do. They uphold a shared vision 'to create a happy and safe environment that inspires children to become curious, imaginative, independent and articulated learners'.

The challenging and fun learning experiences that staff provide are of the highest quality and precisely build on children's interests, learning needs and any experiences from home. This helps children to become deeply engrossed in their learning and contributes towards the outstanding progress that they make. The devoted staff cherish each and every chi...ld.

They place a sharp emphasis on ensuring that all children are extremely happy, settled and assured in their care. Staff are positive role models. They implement novel ideas, such as a kindness tree, to value and celebrate the many acts of kindness that children demonstrate on a daily basis.

Staff give clear safety instructions to children during more complex activities. This helps to advance their ability to manage risks independently and gain a superior knowledge of how to keep themselves safe. Staff continually provide children with an abundance of support, encouragement and praise during their play.

This contributes towards children becoming remarkably resilient, confident and independent individuals.

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

The inspirational manager and her team of professional staff show admirable energy and enthusiasm. Their considerable evaluations of practice and precise priorities for improvement are focused intently on providing high-quality care and learning experiences for children.

The manager invests highly in her staff team. Purposeful supervisions and customised professional development are skilfully aimed at enriching the quality of teaching. For instance, staff have applied their new-found learning from recent mathematics training to extend opportunities for children to compare, sequence and measure, to cumulatively build on their excellent skills.

Staff use the information from their precise assessments of children's learning to make educated decisions about what they need to learn next. The wide range of ambitious learning experiences that staff provide consistently support children to make the highest rates of progress across all areas. Additional funding is precisely steered to help all children to gain the essential skills they need for their future success.

Children show confidence to take part in new activities that help to equip them with some of the practical skills that they will later use throughout life. For example, children are eager to challenge themselves when attempting to hammer nails into wood. They listen carefully to safety instructions and follow these perfectly to gain a superb understanding of how to keep themselves safe.

The friendly staff promote a very positive ethos across the pre-school. Older children revel in opportunities to show younger children how to complete more complex tasks, such as making fresh orange juice, and demonstrate pride when seeing their friends achieve the desired effect.Staff swiftly embrace children's love for books.

They provide a key focus on stories with fundamental morals that help children to develop a greater awareness of feelings and emotions and difference and diversity. Exceptional learning ideas, such as encouraging children to create a personalised 'family tree', help to extend their superb knowledge of what makes them unique.Staff rapidly build on children's learning from home.

For example, following a visit to observe a steam locomotive, staff invite children to create a role-play train to help inspire their imagination further. Staff's highly effective interventions encourage children to recall and use new language, such as 'buffers' and 'couplings', to precisely describe special features. This contributes towards all children becoming extremely fluent and confident communicators.

The expert staff involve children in exciting experiences, such as picking apples from trees in the allotment, to help extend their understanding of where their healthy food comes from. Staff's timely interventions encourage children to assess whether fruits are ripe, conquer problems and learn about how inedible organic waste can be used to create other useful materials.Parents are expertly involved in all aspects of their children's learning and development and nursery life.

Staff provide ingenious home learning ideas, such as embarking upon a nature walk to search for sticks that represent characters from well-known stories, to enhance children's early reading skills at home.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.The manager and her team of staff adopt a coherent culture of vigilance and have an excellent understanding of their role in keeping children safe.

Extensive training, informative updates and the sharing of a wide range of safeguarding scenarios help to equip staff with an expert knowledge of the procedures to follow to protect children's welfare. Recruitment and induction procedures are tremendously thorough and help to ensure that all staff have a superb understanding of their roles and responsibilities. Learning from valuable research is promptly applied to enhance the safety procedures within the preschool and eliminate any risks.