Curriculum Design - Early Years Foundation Stage

Curriculum Design Statement For EYFS: intent, implementation, impact

Intent

The breadth of our curriculum is designed with three broad goals in mind:

1) To support pupils to develop as confident, responsible citizens in line with our aims and values

2) To provide rich, diverse and engaging opportunities for learning

3) To provide a coherent, structured, academic curriculum that leads to sustained knowledge and understanding with greater depth of understanding for those who are capable.

 

1.  Aims and Values

We have developed three curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum, bring about the aims and values of our school, and respond to the particular needs of our school community:

Citizenship – which helps our pupils to be an active, responsible member of our school, the locality, our country and the world

Ambition – which help pupils to build aspirations and know available possibilities for their future lives

Resilience – which helps our pupils to overcome difficulties and use their initiative to solve problems and further their learning.

In the Early Years and KS1, the drivers of ‘ambition’ and ‘resilience’ are promoted through two ‘Achievosaurs’ (which link directly to the Characteristics of Effective Learning). Citizenship is promoted through the ‘Super Citizen’ character. Children are taught daily to identify the learning behaviours of these characters within themselves and are encouraged to participate in activities and play that embed them.

2.  Opportunities for Learning

We incorporate a range of varied learning opportunities to develop children’s interest and engagement including experiences beyond the National Curriculum expectations.  Adult directed activities focus on collaborative, enquiry, based learning that use a range of teaching and learning approaches.  Continuous and enhanced provisions are planned and structured to enable children to practice, apply and consoldiate their learning through child initiated play.

3. A Coherently planned curriculum

Underpinned by the three curriculum drivers, our Early Years curriculum sets out to meet the requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum by:

  1. Planning topics over the long term which provide opportunity to meet the requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum, covering all 17 strands of the curriculum and providing opportunity to meet the Early Learning Goals at the end of the Foundation Stage
  2. selecting outcomes that are developmentally appropriate and emphasise which skills and knowledge children should understand
  3. showing criteria for progression within the Development Matters document
  4. providing opportunities for repetition and the revisiting of key skills and knowledge

Capability

The curriculum sets high expectations for all children, however for some pupils with high levels of special educational needs or disabilities then a more personal approach to the curriculum is designed.  This is done on an individual basis that targets children personal targets, needs and next steps for learning appropriate to the child's developmental needs.

Implementation

Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; two main principles underpin it: 

1)     Learning of both knowledge and disciplinary skills and concepts is most effective with repetition

2)     Retrieval of previously learned substantive knowledge and disciplinary concepts and skills is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength

In addition, we also understand that deep learning is invisible in the short-term and embedding knowledge takes time.  These processes are supported through the learning structure with retrieval practices being embedded in to adult directed activities at an age appropriate level.  Retrieval practices also take place over time to revisit and embed key learning into long term memory – these are termed ‘Flashbacks’.  Links between lessons, subjects and real life experiences also underpinned the embedding of knowledge, skills and concepts. 

Some of our content is subject specific, whilst other content is combined in a cross-curricular approach.  Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, class discussions and areas of play-based provision indoors and outdoors, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practise for previously learned content. Carefully planned enhanced provision and focussed tasks, provide the children with opportunities to deepen and embed their knowledge by applying skills independently.

Assessment

Assessment within lessons and over time feeds into the sequence of lessons to ensure that children are coping with the curriculum content and retaining previously taught content.  Adaptations, re-teaching and interventions are all used to ensure that learning of substantive knowledge is developed and that disciplinary skills and concepts are advanced.  Curriculum review feeds in to this process with evaluation over time informing future curriculum changes.

Impact

The impact of our curriculum is that by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, the majority of pupils are ‘school ready’,  having mastered key skills and curriculum content with some pupils having a greater depth of understanding.   We assess children’s acquisition of the identified knowledge, skills and concepts through in lesson assessment/observations (assessment for learning) and assessment of children's outcomes.  All of these assessments feed in to teacher assessment judgements throughout the year and the summative assessment judgement at the end of the academic year.  Children’s development is monitored carefully to ensure they are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum.