The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the stage in your child’s life that gets them ready and prepares them for school and underpins all future learning and successes. The EYFS was created to ensure your child’s first 5 years are happy, active, exciting, fun and secure, as well as to support their learning, development and care needs. All nurseries, pre-schools, reception classes and childminders must follow the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.
Intent
Our EYFS curriculum is designed to meet the needs of individual children, including our disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND. We strongly believe, that every child is an individual and deserves the best education possible. We recognise that all children are unique, celebrating and welcoming differences within our school community. Therefore, we are providing a flexible approach to learning often based on an ‘umbrella’ topic as our children are lacking their own experiences and knowledge about the world. Our ethos in Early Years is to support children’s personal, social and emotional development so that they feel safe and secure and are ready to learn. Blackthorn EYFS curriculum is designed to support young learners to develop skills in: · Playing and Exploring · Learning Actively · Creating and Thinking Critically We strongly believe in the benefit of children having positive and meaningful relationships with adults within the setting. We are committed to support every child to be a curious life - long learner.
Implementation
Our curriculum follows the Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. During their time with us children will learn, explore and engage with lots of challenging, open and creative activities, often based on their own interests. Over a combination of teacher led and child’s led learning opportunities, we are enabling children to develop their ability to learn independently. Our exciting and stimulating learning environment is regularly adapted, so we can meet the needs of the children in our setting.
The broad and balanced opportunities for learning are designed to support all the children, regardless of where they are on their learning journey both, outdoor and indoor environments are designed to evolve which promote independence and allows the children to access the curriculum independently and confidently with the necessary level of support and challenge.
Children attending BPS EYFS benefit from being listen to, developing conversations, playing with adults and, learning new skills and concepts. Ongoing assessment practices, like scaffolding and feedback is complemented through a range of observations, pupils voice, comments from parents and other family members as well as professional dialogue between practitioners. On entry, a baseline assessment is undertaken and combined with the voice of the parent in addition to information and assessment gathered from other settings and agencies. EYFS Formative and Summative assessment is used to measure outcomes of our curriculum and plan experiences which ensures progress. These provide the EYFS practitioners with information for future planning making sure learning is embedded and consistent and that all our children continue to make outstanding progress within our EYFS setting. Our assessment judgements are being regularly moderated both in school and externally within schools in our trust.
Impact
Our curriculum is designed to support all children to succeed in their early years learning journey. Our pupils make accelerated progress across all areas of learning. Children with SEN in addition to those with EAL are equipped in strategies and tools, to ensure they can communicate their needs successfully. A consistent and robust daily teaching of phonics enables our children to apply blending and segmenting skills into reading and writing. Our curriculum allows children to develop early language skills. Pupils leaving EYFS are able to freely and successfully communicate with adults and peers, and are prepared to continue their learning journey in KS1.
Parents as Partners
At Blackthorn Primary, we recognise that parents play a vital part in education. We are actively working to build, develop and maintain positive, strong relationship between practitioners and parents and/or carers. We work hard to ensure that parents are being regularly informed about their child progress, and we are always happy to provide additional support where necessary.