EYFS

At St John’s Catholic Primary School we aim to provide first-hand experiences whilst encouraging children to build resilience, ambition, and a lifelong love of learning. We aim to build on the wealth of knowledge and skills children already have when they arrive.

Leaders construct a curriculum that is ambitious and designed to give all pupils the knowledge, self-belief and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. The EYFS curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced, giving clear progression through the seven areas of learning. It is a broad and balanced curriculum which builds on children’s knowledge and ability, towards sufficient skills for future learning.

There is a specific focus on the Prime Areas, ensuring that children build on their personal and physical development, acquire a wide vocabulary, communicate effectively and secure a firm knowledge of phonics. This gives them the foundations for learning, especially in preparation for them to become confident and fluent readers and writers.

We have five curriculum ambitions we hope all children will achieve by the end of their time in the EYFS and these are achieved by learning core skills during adult led activities and developing these skills during child-initiated learning.

The school’s approach to teaching early reading and synthetic phonics is systematic and ensures that children learn to read words and simple sentences by the end of Reception.

The school has the same academic ambitions for all children. For children with particular needs, such as those with SEND, their curriculum is designed to be ambitious and to meet their individual needs.

The EYFS curriculum has 7 areas of learning; Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED), Physical Development, Communication and Language, Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design. The prime Areas are fundamental, work together, and are crucial to development in all other areas. The Specific Areas include essential skills and knowledge. They grow out of the prime areas and provide important contexts for learning. The focus is, therefore, now to develop children’s competence in the prime areas before focusing in on the specific areas as children develop confidence.

In addition to these areas of learning, the EYFS curriculum seeks to foster ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’. These are the ways in which children engage with other people and their environment – playing and exploring, active learning, and creating and thinking critically – underpin learning and development across all areas and support children in remaining effective and motivated learners.

The children learn through a play-based curriculum which is planned from the needs and interests of each child.  Children benefit from meaningful learning across the EYFS curriculum, which is delivered through a mixture of Child Initiated Learning and Adult Led Activities. The EYFS pedagogy is play-based, creating a continuous provision within the indoor and outdoor environment, giving an extensive and varied opportunity for children of all abilities, to learn and progress successfully.

Children are observed on a regular basis to assess their learning and ‘next steps’ are planned accordingly. Staff divide their time between delivering planned adult led small group activities, planned large group activities, supporting child-initiated play, making observations and moving children’s learning forward.  Children are encouraged to be active learners, to think critically and creatively and to develop independence.

Children enjoy field trips, educational visits and visitors to bring their learning to life. We firmly believe that parents and carers are a child's first educators, and we want to work in partnership. We engage with parents and carers by; sharing activities, observations and updates on Tapestry, a weekly newsletter to share what we will be learning the following week and offering support through workshops.

The impact of the EYFS curriculum is reflected in having well rounded, happy and confident children transitioning into Year 1. We work to ensure our children develop into confident and positive learners, who are excited by new challenges. We endeavour to ensure that our children leave the EYFS ready to move with confidence into KS1 and beyond.

We measure progress and children’s learning across the year through formative and summative assessments which are based on the teacher’s knowledge of the child, and photographs and observations recorded on Tapestry. We use our observations of the children to make formative assessments of their attainment and to inform future planning. This is then built upon the children’s current knowledge. Our summative assessments look at the children’s attainment in relation to the age related expectations, developed from the Development matters framework markers. Our assessment is moderated both internally and with external schools within our diocese.