Nursery & Reception

In the Early Years Foundation Stage, your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development.

Children should mostly develop the 3 prime areas first.

These are:

• Communication and language
• Physical development
• Personal, social and emotional development.

These prime areas are those most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning. As children grow and develop, the prime areas will help them develop skills in 4 specific areas. These are:

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the world
• Expressive arts and design.

These 7 areas are used to plan your child’s learning. Children in the EYFS learn by playing and exploring, being active and through creative and critical thinking which takes place both indoors and outdoors. Alongside this and planning from children’s interests, we also have learning enhancements for each half term to spark curiosity, awe and wonder.

Development Matters is a comprehensive framework from the Department for Education (DfE) which sets the standards for learning, development and care of children from birth to five. For each area, the practice guidance sets out the Early Learning Goals. These goals state what is expected that children will know and be able to do at the end of their Reception year of their education. The practice guidance also sets out the likely stages of progress a child makes along their learning journey towards the early learning goals in Nursery and Reception. We ensure that this is used when assessing children and planning their ‘next steps’ of learning.

Please see our progression documents below to find out more about our curriculum:

Supporting learning at home:

In order to support your child in EYFS with their learning at home, please click the link below to download a resource outlining the key learning milestones from birth to five years old and ways to foster and promote learning outside of school.