ST Mewan CP School - EYFS
Intent
At St Mewan every child is valued as a unique individual. We welcome and celebrate differences within our EYFS community and have a focus on inclusivity whilst ensuring early identification and intervention are implemented where necessary.
We aim to provide an environment where children feel nurtured, loved and have a sense of belonging to their class, phase and wider school community. We strive to develop all children’s confidence so that they are able to become critical thinkers, full of creativity who have the resilience and skills to become successful lifelong learners. Our approach delivers the knowledge, skills and understanding encompassed in the early learning goals in a way that enables the pupils to successful progress from our nursery to reception class and beyond. This includes preparing pupils for the next phase of their schooling. This achieved through a balance between child-led and adult-initiated learning and a focus on developing early language and enhancing vocabulary through stimulating activities.
Through our EYFS we aim to enable pupils to see themselves as part of the school and wider community and celebrate the unique opportunities are local area provides.
We follow the EYFS curriculum in full and aim to provide experiential opportunities which provide pupils with the skills to succeed in future learning and life, and the aspirations to want to achieve this. This includes introduces pupils to the learning behaviours they will need and at a later date. We provide challenge which ensures every child meets their full potential and begin to instill the values of school and society.
As part of a school community, our nursery pupils benefit from enhanced transition and from enrichment opportunities which we aim to provide to the whole school such as music with a trained music teacher and PE led by a PE lead.
Implementation
Throughout EYFS at St Mewan School, we follow the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. This framework specifies the requirement for learning and development in the Early Years and provides prime and specific areas of learning that we cover in our curriculum.
We have a curriculum that is creative and based upon wow experiences and topics, which engage and inspire children. We encourage active learning to ensure that children are motivated and interested. All areas of the EYFS Curriculum are followed and planned for, to ensure that there is a broad, balanced and progressive learning environment and curriculum. Further information about how we implement this can be seen in subject specific implementation statements as we ensure our EYFS curriculum is progressive and sequenced as part of the wider school.
Impact
Data and monitoring demonstrates that our children’s progress across the EYFS curriculum is consistently good regardless of their starting points and that attainment is in line with national levels and exceeds local levels. We have high expectations of all pupils and provide early intervention or challenge where required, with data showing this is successful. Our ongoing assessments against the early learning goals identify needs quickly and subsequent data shows we are quick at actioning support.
We are confident in the quality of our data outcomes as we measure consistently against local schools within our trust and work collaboratively with them to monitor our outcomes and provision. The Early years lead ensures quality first teaching and consistency within a large early year's unit and regularly monitors provision and meets with senior leadership to implement change where required.
The impact of our curriculum can also be measured by how effectively it helps our children to develop into well rounded confident individuals who embody our values and take with them the knowledge, skills and attitudes that hold them in good stead to be lifelong learners and valuable future citizens – as identified through school improvement work and the early years lead for the county who identified our provision as an example of good practice. This has led to others visiting our provision as exemplary work.
