That was the conclusion of Ofsted recently when they made their first inspection visit of the ‘Early Years’ provider. Ofsted awarded the highest accolade of “outstanding” quoting “the quality of teaching is exemplary”, “the practitioners use their expertise to provide children with an educational programme that is extremely challenging, exciting and worthy of disseminating to others”. One excerpt from the report tells a story all of itself:
Practitioners are exceptionally skilful at following children’s interests and use well-considered questions to extend children’s thinking. For example, children see a spider crawling across the pre-school floor. They draw a practitioner’s attention to the spider, who quickly and efficiently uses this spontaneous incident as a learning aide. She confidently finds a small pot to contain the spider and asks a child if they would like to find a magnifying glass to explore the spider in more detail. The child quickly returns with a magnifying glass. The practitioner enables the now, larger group of children who have come to see what is happening to view the spider in more detail. This creates a lively discussion about how many legs the spider has, what colour it is and where children think it might live. The discussion concludes with children telling the practitioner that they think the spider should be taken outside and placed on a tree so that it won’t be trodden on. The practitioner helps children take it outside and settles it into its new environment. Children excitedly rush back into the room to find the plastic spider living in one of the story/rhyme sacks. They each take it in turns to look at the plastic one and break out into songs about spiders. Throughout this activity, the practitioner’s input superbly guides children’s thoughts and challenges their thinking, while allowing them ample time to consider their own knowledge.
Well done to Jackie Leach & all her team. Details of Bluebells, and other Education Providers supporting West Bergholt, are available on this website.
Click this link to download the full Ofsted report which is in PDF format.