Eldwick Primary School

What is the EYFS?

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the curriculum for children from birth to the end of Reception. It sets the standards for learning, development and care, ensuring that every child gets the best possible start to their education.

At its heart, the EYFS focuses on children learning through play, exploring the world around them, building relationships and developing key early skills. It supports children to become confident, curious and independent learners.

Through our EYFS curriculum, we aim to enable children to succeed through cooperative and collaborative learning principles to become confident, motivated and independent learners who thrive in our diverse world. They are supported to solve problems, resolve conflicts and reflect on their own learning and actions.  We have high expectations and aspirations for our children, but we also recognise their unique starting points. We support them to be resilient, reflective and self-aware and our practices encourage independence, excellent learning behaviours and high levels of wellbeing and involvement as well as promoting culture capital and British values.

Our EYFS curriculum and environment are carefully designed to ensure it makes a positive contribution to pupils’ Spiritual Moral Social and Cultural development. We recognise that pupils’ personal development plays a significant part in their ability to learn and to achieve and we endeavour to support and nurture their development in this area. In addition, we ensure our curriculum includes explicit teaching and learning related to human values (e.g. respect, diversity, equality, tolerance, kindness) and responsible citizenship.

In Nursery, there is a strong focus on the Prime Areas and Characteristics of Effective Learning. As a result, pupils leave our Nursery setting with well- developed play skills, self-confidence, awareness of the feelings of others and strong communication skills. They are curious and independent learners who are confident to select and direct their own learning. 

In Reception, we ensure the emphasis on developing the Prime Areas is continued, with an additional emphasis on developing Literacy and Maths knowledge and skills.  Our curriculum offers a wealth of opportunities to consolidate and deepen children’s knowledge and understanding to enable them to achieve the end of Reception expectations (ELG’s) as set out in the ‘Statutory Framework’.  In addition to the Prime and Specific areas of learning, our curriculum recognises that the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’ underpins all seven areas of learning and development and play a central role in becoming an effective learner, which is an essential aspect of EYFS.