Early Years Foundation Stage Framework
Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is how the Government and early years professionals describe the time in your child’s life between birth and age 5. This means children in our Nursery and Reception classes.
This is a very important stage as it helps your child get ready for main school as well as preparing them for their future learning and successes. From when your child is born up until the age of 5, their early years’ experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; and support their development, care and learning needs.
Nurseries, pre-schools, Reception classes and childminders registered to deliver the EYFS must follow a legal document called the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.
The EYFS sets the standards that schools must meet to ensure that children learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe. It promotes teaching and learning to ensure ‘school readiness’ and gives children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good progress through school and life.
The children are given opportunities to play and explore, to investigate and experience things and to ‘have a go’. They are active and develop their own ideas. They are all unique and will have different interests and abilities. The areas of development have been divided into two groups:
Three Prime Areas
These prime areas are those most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning. As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in four specific areas:
These seven areas are used to plan your child’s learning and activities according to their unique needs. This is a little bit like a curriculum in primary and secondary schools, but it's suitable for very young children, and it's designed to be really flexible so that staff can follow your child' needs and interests.
At the end of Reception the children will be assessed against the 17 Early Learning Goals (see link below) and their progress shared with parents.
Our Approach to Teaching and Learning in EYFS
Throughout our EYFS at St. Mary's Primary School and Little Oaks Nursery, we follow the Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. This framework specifies the learning and development in the Early Years and provides prime and specific areas of learning we must cover in our curriculum. Our children are at the heart of our curriculum. The knowledge and concepts that are taught throughout our EYFS are relevant to our children and provide progression and essential links to later learning.
Our Early Years environments are enabling, with learning areas both indoors and outdoors filled with a rich array of open-ended and easily accessible resources. We have a good balance between adult-led and child-led activities and provide open-ended sustained play opportunities throughout the day that are both engaging and challenging. Learning experiences are all designed to support learning and to deepen knowledge in order that our children build firm foundations and connections that are needed for future learning.
How the EYFS Underpins our Whole School Curriculum
The EYFS framework is structured differently to the national curriculum. Whilst the national curriculum is organised into subject areas, the EYFS framework is organised across seven areas of learning. However, the knowledge and skills taught in EYFS do feed into the national curriculum subjects.
The following document demonstrates how the early learning goals match up with the national curriculum statements.