Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum

Intent

• Our curriculum is designed to recognise children’s prior learning, both from previous settings and their experiences at home. provide the best possible start at Little Kingshill Combined School, ensuring each individual reaches their full potential from their various starting points. It has been designed to enable children to succeed. There is a strong emphasis on the Prime Areas of learning; Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Physical Development and Communication and Language.
• We believe that parents and carers are a child’s first educator and therefore work very closely to ensure they are involved in what we do with their child at school.    
• At Little Kingshill Combined School, we recognise that a language rich environment improves academic outcomes, and is a life skill to ensure success beyond school. conversation develops children’s thinking and understanding, which in turn promotes self-confidence, resilience and empathy which support the child’s well-being.  
• We believe that high level engagement ensures high level attainment. We therefore provide an engaging curriculum that maximises opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences. We promote the unique child by following children’s interests and ideas and offering extended periods of play and sustained thinking to foster a lifelong love of learning both in and outside of school.  

Implementation

• The Nursery and Reception follow the curriculum as outlined in The Early years Foundation Stage Framework 2021 which influences what we teach. We also use non-statutory guidance from Working with the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage Principles into Practice (Julian Grenier). This includes the 7 features of effective practice which guides our holistic exploration and investigations.

The following policy details the specifics of our setting.

• Our cultural capital statement is focused on independence, resilience, positive attitude, care and respect of surrounding. We aim to extend listening and attention skills within all we do and control our behaviour in conjunction with others:

‘children need to become more independent in self-care, be more resilliant and have a positive attitude when faced with unfamiliar tasks’.

• Our learning is both adult led and child initiated which allows our children to explore through the characteristics of effective learning; thinking, engagement and motivation.
• We have designed our Little Kingshill curriculum around this demographic and this is used to find the unique child’s starting point, next steps and gives assessment opportunities to identify progress. This is subject to change each academic year based on the needs of the current cohort. The current version below has been updated for our 2023-2024 cohort.

Impact

At Little Kingshill Combined School we aim to provide firm foundations for our children’s future education. Through our individualised curriculum we aim to work in partnership with parents and carers to encourage happy, confident and resilient children who are excited by school and enjoy learning.