Policies and Procedures
Policies
Our staff are experienced and a majority hold a level 3 in relevant childcare qualifications. Also a member of staff holds a degree in Early Years . Our professional development is continually being updated through ‘in house training’ and courses provided by Medway Early Years and other outside agencies. Amongst our staff we have a full-time Special Educational Needs and Disability Coordinator (SENDCo). All staff have attended First Aid courses and at least one First Aider is always present in each room at all times.
All staff, including voluntary helpers are checked through the Disclosure and Barring Service. This checks for spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and final warnings to ensure your child is kept safe within our Pre-school.
Our Pre-school employs a high ratio of adults to children to ensure all children are:
- given enough time and attention for their needs.
- able to talk about their interests and activities they have taken part in.
- provided with a full experience and able to benefit fully from activities provided.
- able to explore and be adventurous safely.
Our Pre-school ensures that all contact details, attendance information, characteristics including ethnicity, special, additional and differing educational needs amd medical information is kept securely under the ‘Data Protection Act’. By law some of this information is required by local authorities, the Department of Educational and agencies, including Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and Ofsted.
Procedures
We advise parents/carers to create a goodbye ritual, where a firm goodbye and reassurance that you will be back at the end of the session promptly on time for collection. To avoid causing your child any distress and disruption to their settling-in-progress, we advise that you do not visit your child during the session.
All members of staff abide to Medway’s ‘Safe Guarding Children’ document, which allows children to sit on a staff members knees if the child asks to, and we can hug a child if asked or if a child needs comforting. Also all staff have had Child Protection training to reinforce appropriate handling of children.
The staff in each room will deal with incidents as they occur. If unacceptable behaviour is persistent by a child, their parents/carers will be asked to visit the Pre-school to discuss with their child’s key-person the best way to achieve a positive outcome.
Our Pre-school provides protective clothing which is used with messy activities such as painting however, we cannot quarantee that your child’s clothing will remain clean and dry. We encourage independance and skills to look after themselves including being able to clean themselves after going to the toilet and taking off and putting on outdoor clothes and shoes.
- We advise that children arrive at the Pre-school wearing clothing and have a spare set of clothing (kept within a bag) that is easy to manage to encourage this behaviour.
- A set of indoor shoes are required to change into for indoor play.
- Appropriate clothing for the weather is needed for example sun hats and sun cream applied before the child comes to Pre-school for the summer term and cardigans or light jackets for winter term.
- A clean drinking bottle containing water only is needed.
- We do not allow necklaces or chains and only studded earrings to be worn for health and safety reasons.
- We discourage the use of dummies and comforters, if needed they should be left in your child’s bag.
All clothing and possessions including drinking bottles and show and tell items should be named.