Early Years Foundation Stage

Every child deserves the best possible start in life and support to fulfil their potential.  A child’s experience in the early years has a major impact on their future life chances.  A secure, safe and happy childhood is important in its own right, and it provides the foundation for children to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up.  When you the parents choose to use early years services such as our nursery you want to know that we will keep your children safe and help them thrive.  The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the framework that provides that assurance. 

The aim of the EYFS is to help our children achieve the five Every Child Matters outcomes of staying safe, being healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well being by: 

Setting the standards for the learning, development and care young children should experience when they are attending our nursery, ensuring that every child makes progress and that no child gets left behind. 

Providing for equality of opportunity and anti discriminatory practice and ensuring that every child is included and not disadvantaged because of ethnicity, culture or religion, home language, family background, learning difficulties, gender or ability. 

Creating the framework for partnership working between parents and professionals, and between any other setting your child may attend. 

Improving quality and consistency in the early years sector through a universal set of standards which apply to all settings, ending the distinction between care and learning in the existing frameworks, and providing the basis for the inspection and regulation regime. 

Laying a secure foundation for future learning through learning and development that is planned around the individual needs and interests of the child, and informed by the use of ongoing observational assessment. 

Children are competent learners from birth and develop and learn in a wide variety of ways.  All our practitioners should, therefore, look carefully at the children in their care, consider their needs, their interests, and their stages of development and use al this information to help plan a challenging and enjoyable experience across all the areas of learning and development. 

There are six areas covered by the early learning goals and educational programmes:

Personal, social and emotional 

For children, being special to someone and well cared for is vital for their physical, social and emotional health and well being. Being acknowledged and affirmed by people in their lives leads to children gaining confidence and inner strength through secure attachments with these people. Exploration within close relationships leads to growth of self assurance, promoting a sense of belonging which allows children to explore the world from a secure base. Children need adults to set a good example and to give them opportunities for interaction with others so that they can develop positive ideas about themselves and others. Children who are encouraged to feel free to express their ideas and their feelings, such as joy, sadness, frustration and fear, can develop strategies to cope with new, challenging or stressful situations.

Communication, language and literacy 

Communicating and being with others helps children to build social relationships which provide opportunities for friendship, empathy and sharing emotions. The ability to communicate helps children to participate more fully in society.

To become skilful communicators, babies and children need to be with people who have

meaning for them and with whom they have a warm and loving relationships, such as their family or carers and, in a group situation a key person whom they know and trust.

Babies respond differently to different sounds and from an early age are able to distinguish sound patterns. They learn to talk by being talked to.

Babies and children use their voices to make contact and let people know what the need and how they feel, establishing their own identities and personalities.

Parents and immediate family members most easily understand their babies’ and children's communications and can often interpret for others.

All children learn best through activities and experiences that engage all the senses. For example, music, dance, rhymes and songs play a key role in language development.

As children develop speaking and listening skills they build the foundations for literacy, for making sense of visual and verbal signs and ultimately for reading and writing. Children need lots of opportunities to interact with others as they develop these skills and to use a wide variety of resources for expressing their understanding, including mark making, drawing, modeling, reading and writing.

Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy 

Babies’ and Children’s mathematical development occurs as they seek

patterns, make connections and recognise relationships through finding out

about and working with numbers and counting, with sorting and matching and

with shape, space and measures.

Children use their knowledge and skills in theses areas to solve problems,

generate new questions and make connections across other areas of learning

and development.

Knowledge and understanding of the world 

Babies and children find out about the world through exploration and from a variety of sources, including their families and friends, the media, and through what they see and hear.

Babies and children need regular opportunities to  learn about different ways of life, to be given accurate information and to develop positive and caring attitudes towards others.

Children should be helped to learn and respect and value all people and learn to avoid

misapprehensions and negative attitudes towards others when they develop their Knowledge and Understanding of the World Children should be involved in the practical applications of their knowledge and skills which will promote self-esteem through allowing them to make decisions about what to investigate and how to do it.

Physical Development 

Babies and children learn by being active and Physical Development takes place across all areas of Learning and Development.

Physical Development helps children gain confidence in what they can do.

Physical Development enables children to feel the positive benefits of being healthy and active.

Physical Development helps children to develop a positive sense of well-being.

Good health in the early years helps to safeguard health and well-being throughout life. It is important that children develop healthy habits when they first learn about food and activity. Growing with appropriate weight gain in the first years of life helps to guard against obesity in later life.

Creative development 

Creativity is about taking risks and making connections and is strongly linked to play.

Creativity emerges as children become absorbed in action and explorations of their own ideas, expressing them through movement, making and transforming things using media and materials such as crayons, paints, scissors, words, sounds, movement, props and make-believe.

Creativity involves children in initiating their own learning and making choices and decisions.

Children’s responses to what they see, hear and experience through their senses are individual and the way they represent their experiences is unique and valuable.

Being creative enables babies and children to explore many processes, media

and materials and to make new things emerge as a result.

None of these areas of Learning and Developing can be delivered in isolation from the others.  They are equally important and depend on each other to support a rounded approach to child development.  All these areas must be delivered through planned, purposeful play with a balance of adult led and child-initiated activities.