Our Early Years Foundation Stage

At our school, we pride ourselves on offering a child-centred, play-based EYFS curriculum that is innovative, exciting and challenging, both inside and outside. Our curriculum is designed to enable our children to learn creatively and actively, building our teaching skilfully around them. The result is children who make accelerated progress throughout the EYFS and step confidently into Key Stage 1, ready to tackle the National Curriculum.

The EYFS is made up of seven different areas of learning. The first three are named the ‘Prime Areas’:

· Communication & Language

· Physical Development

· Personal, Social & Emotional Development

National research and our own experience shows that children have to make progress in these Prime areas before they can comfortably operate and learn within the other four areas. For example, a child first has to develop their communication and language before they can read and write; and a child cannot sit down at a table and work on complex maths calculations with a partner before they have first learned how to interact maturely with their contemporaries.

Then there are four further ‘Specific areas’ of learning:

· Literacy

· Mathematics

· Understanding the World

· Expressive Art & Design

Our approach to EYFS is thorough. We plan using the EYFS curriculum, targeting milestones each term through formal and informal learning experiences alongside carefully planned continuous provision resources. Within this are opportunities to ‘ready’ the children for the Year 1 curriculum, exposing them to vocabulary and learning experiences that support a strong transition into the National Curriculum.

Each term has a theme, which is reflected though the classroom provision, formal learning activities and books shared in class. We offer formal reading, (Bug Club Phonics and guided reading), writing and maths (White Rose Maths) activities to reception children each day, building from 10 mins to 30 mins in length across the academic year. We also offer learning enhancements for all children in EYFS. These enhancements are planned each week, following an assessment of the skills and needs of the children. We teach these enhancements through targeted teaching to ensure that the needs of the children are addressed, allowing for accelerated learning.

We strongly believe that young children learn best when they initiate their own learning, so within the structures of our planning and provision, we allow our children to define their own day, self-selecting resources and building strong relationships with the teachers in the setting in the process. The evidence suggests that all this leads to life-long learners who are independent, inquisitive and eager to make steps forward.

Our high adult ratio allows for quality adult-child interaction, to drive understanding through continuous provision engagement. We also offer targeted 1:1 and group support to ensure that the children in EYFS receive a bespoke education and end their EYFS years ready to begin the National Curriculum in Year 1.

The EYFS emphasises strong communication between parents and practitioners in order to build an accurate picture of a child’s developments throughout their early years. To this end, we use the excellent ‘Tapestry’ online journal, which enables parents to log in and see their child’s significant steps in school and also allows parents and carers to upload any progression witnessed at home, in order that teachers can form an all-round assessment of where the child sits within the EYFS.

We have more information on how we teach Phonics on the page below.