At Water Primary School, we have created a unique and inspiring EYFS Curriculum. The curriculum is designed to reflect the interests and needs of our children and to immerse them in a language rich environment. We prioritise high quality interactions through continuous provision learning, alongside carefully selected adult focussed activities. Our children guide and drive their own learning through carefully resourced continuous provision with invitations to learn (enhancements) to aid the development of skills and knowledge.

Each topic planned is individually tailored to our cohort, with the aim of ensuring that all children leaving Reception are ready to start the KS1 curriculum. Topics are selected in order to allow the children to take their learning in their own directions and cater for each individuals’ interests. All topics are carefully resourced and are introduced alongside high quality, diverse texts.

Our ambitious curriculum aims to teach all children the skills and knowledge in order that they reach the seventeen Early Learning Goals described in the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. We use our high-quality baselining interactions to form each child’s starting points. We know our children well and quickly recognise those who will need early intervention due to entering our setting with low starting points. We monitor who is and is not on track regularly, put in timely catch-up sessions and tailor future planning to provide more opportunities for skill development and progress.

Our curriculum is play-based, however there is also a need for some direct teacher-led activities to ensure all children gain essential knowledge and skills. We have a balance of child initiated and adult focus learning allowing sufficient, sustained periods of play with support and resources to allow children to repeat and practise their taught skills through play.

We use Development Matters as a rich resource to support our knowledge of child development and as a supporting document for our curriculum. We feel that this document reflects our early years vision of embedding quality interactions in a variety of playful situations. It supports us to create a wide variety of learning opportunities across all areas of development and also shows a direct link of how our EYFS curriculum leads directly into the KS1 curriculum.