Peterborough Pre-Schools

Our Staff

Our pre-schools are project managed by Family Action’s “Early Years Manager” in Peterborough. She holds Early Years Professional Status and is qualified to Level 6 in Early Years.

Each setting has a supervisor who is qualified to a minimum of Level 3 in Early Years, and they are responsible for the day-to-day running of their setting. They are supported in their role by qualified Early Years staff. 
The pre-schools adhere to the statutory requirements for staff:child ratios. This means that there will always be a minimum of 1 staff member per 4 children under the age of 3, and 1 staff member per 8 children aged 3 and over. Wherever possible we exceed the minimum requirements with our staffing levels.

Family Action has a supervision system in place that means that all staff receive regular meetings with their line manager. The purpose of these meetings is to discuss key children, safeguarding issues, health and safety, professional development and any other agenda items requested by the staff member.

Our Learning Environment

You may notice that our learning environments are a bit different to the traditional early years setting.

They feature furniture and items that you may have at home which helps create a comforting and homely space that feels familiar to the children. We include lots of natural materials and neutral colours to generate a calming space.

Using real resources rather than shop bought toys means that some items need to be handled more carefully to avoid breakages. We believe this teaches children to respect their environment and to start to understand the consequences of their actions. There is still a place for manufactured plastic resources within our settings, but these are diminishing. Children are also supported to care for their environment by helping with small tasks, looking after the garden and clearing up after themselves at snack time.

Out pre-schools offer the children lots of opportunities to use their natural curiosity to explore and learn. We provide open ended resources and loose parts that encourage imaginative play. For example, our construction area will include log slices, sticks, pebbles, wooden planks, pine- cones and many more natural items that a child is free to create with. We believe that if you provide a child with a shop bought car garage to play with it will usually be played with in the same way every time; offer them a  selection of wooden planks and other natural building materials and they will create their own, ever evolving garage that allows them to explore how different gradients affect the speed of the cars and which building techniques are the most successful.

Nature is important to our wellbeing, and we ensure that the children are offered the chance to learn more about the world around them. Staff support them to explore nature’s creations including using herbs in their play, looking at the properties of unusual fruit and vegetables and caring for wildlife. Children have daily access to our outdoor learning environment where they are supported to learn to risk assess and try new challenges. They use all their senses to experience the changes in seasons and learn how to dress appropriately for all weather conditions. In addition our staff offer wider learning opportunities by exploring the local community.