The curriculum in Early Years is delivered through a balance of adult led and child led learning. It incorporates everything we want the children to experience, learn and be able to do. We have ensured that our curriculum meets all of the requirements of the educational programmes in the statutory framework for the Early Years and flexibility within our teaching and learning allows us to respond quickly to children’s new interests and/or needs.

Below is a broad overview of what we are learning this year. Your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development. All areas are interconnected.

Intent:  At De Havilland Primary School our curriculum is designed to: recognise children’s prior learning from previous settings and their experiences at home, provide first hand learning experiences, whilst allowing the children to build on oracy, metacognition and resilience. Every child is recognised as a unique individual and we celebrate and welcome differences within our school community. The ability to learn is underpinned by the teaching of basic skills, knowledge, concepts and values. We provide enhancement opportunities to engage learning and believe that our first experiences of school should be happy and positive, enabling us to develop a lifelong love of learning. 

Implementation:   Across our Early Years, we follow the Early Years Statutory Framework, published in September 2021 by the DfES. This Framework specifies the requirement for learning and development in the Early Years and provides prime and specific areas of learning we must cover in our curriculum. 

Through planning, teachers ensure that there is a balance of adult led and child initiated activities across the day. During child initiated activities the adults’ role is to show an interest in the children’s ideas, build conversation, facilitate and share ideas and model different skills. Such interaction with the children is essential as this helps to build the children’s understanding and therefore guides new learning. This is then re-fed back into the planning in order to ensure that the areas being covered reflect the children’s fascinations currently within the class. By being, fluid in this way current topics can be readily introduced and adapted. This allows for spontaneity and ensures unexpected learning opportunities are not missed, such as a snow day, birthdays, new siblings and holidays.

Impact:  The impact of our curriculum is measured by assessment procedures which allow us to measure outcomes against all schools nationally. We measure the percentage of pupils achieving age related expectations by the end of Nursery and Reception.