Early Years Foundation Stage
“Children get off to a strong start in the early years. This is because the curriculum is ambitious, very well designed and appealing."
Ofsted Report, 2022
Sophie Hobbs
Early Years Phase Leader
At Floreat Montague Park, we are passionate about Early Years and are committed to ensuring that every child who begins their learning journey with us has a positive, happy and successful start to school life. We recognise that starting school is a significant milestone for both children and their families, and we will work closely in partnership with you to ensure a smooth transition into school within a safe, compliant, nurturing and stimulating environment where every child feels valued, supported and ready to learn.
We appreciate that every child is unique, and we are committed to building positive relationships and inclusive environments, ensuring that all children have equal opportunities to thrive. In Nursery, your child will be allocated a key worker and a key group, and in Reception, your child's key worker will be their class teacher. However, throughout the day your child will benefit from high-quality interactions with a range of experienced support staff.
Whilst at school, your child will spend the majority of their day within our Early Years setting, free-flowing between our age and stage appropriate indoor and outdoor environments. We refer to this as exploration time, where children are given opportunities to self-select resources and take ownership of their learning. During this time, staff work alongside the children, supporting and extending their learning through purposeful SHREC interactions. Through careful modelling and encouragement, we help children develop independence, confidence and personal care skills. This approach, often referred to as learning through play, is a key element of our Early Years provision and helps to provide strong foundations for future learning.
Alongside child-initiated learning, we recognise the importance of direct teaching within the Early Years Foundation Stage. Children take part in daily carpet sessions, beginning with small group activities in Nursery and gradually building towards whole-class learning in Reception. These sessions cover a wide range of areas including communication and language, personal, social and emotional development, literacy and maths.
At Floreat Montague Park, we follow the bespoke EYFS GLF Curriculum. Built upon evidence-informed pedagogical approaches and carefully sequenced foundational knowledge, it provides a coherent, knowledge-rich and ambitious learning journey for all children from the ages of 2 to 5.
Please see a copy of our long term sequence below.
Throughout your child’s Early Years journey, we monitor and celebrate their progress across the seven areas of learning within the Early Years Foundation Stage. At the end of Reception, children are assessed against the Early Learning Goals through teacher judgement, child-initiated observations and adult-led learning activities. If you would like to find out more about these areas of learning and the Early Learning Goals, please refer to the EYFS Statutory framework below.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-foundation-stage-framework--2
Characteristics of Effective Learning
We also look for and encourage the development of the Characteristics of Effective Learning (CoEL), which thread through all areas of learning and support children to be effective and motivated learners. They are:
Playing and exploring – engagement
Children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go
Active learning – motivation
Children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
Creating and thinking critically – thinking
Children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things
Areas of Learning
At Floreat Montague Park, we follow the statutory EYFS Framework and use the non-statutory guidance from Birth 2 Five Matters and Development Matters to support us in our planning, teaching and assessment of your child’s learning journey.
Following this guidance, your child will be taught at their own pace and assessed through seven areas of learning. These seven areas are split into the prime and specific areas.
Across EYFS, we focus on developing the children’s skills in the prime areas first as they are particularly important for building a foundation for igniting children’s curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, forming relationships and thriving.
They are as follows:
The Prime Areas
Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Children’s personal, social and emotional development (PSED) is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives and is fundamental to their cognitive development. Underpinning their personal development are the important attachments that shape their social world. Strong, warm and supportive relationships with adults enable children to learn how to understand their own feelings and those of others. Children should be supported to manage emotions, develop a positive sense of self, set themselves simple goals, have confidence in their own abilities, to persist and wait for what they want and direct attention as necessary. Through adult modelling and guidance, they will learn how to look after their bodies, including healthy eating, and manage personal needs independently. Through supported interaction with other children, they learn how to make good friendships, co-operate and resolve conflicts peaceably. These attributes will provide a secure platform from which children can achieve at school and in later life.
Communication and Language The development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. Children’s back-and-forth interactions from an early age form the foundations for language and cognitive development. The number and quality of the conversations they have with adults and peers throughout the day in a language-rich environment is crucial. By commenting on what children are interested in or doing, and echoing back what they say with new vocabulary added, practitioners will build children's language effectively. Reading frequently to children, and engaging them actively in stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems, and then providing them with extensive opportunities to use and embed new words in a range of contexts, will give children the opportunity to thrive. Through conversation, storytelling and role play, where children share their ideas with support and modelling from their teacher, and sensitive questioning that invites them to elaborate, children become comfortable using a rich range of vocabulary and language structures.
Physical Development: Physical activity is vital in children’s all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy and active lives11. Gross and fine motor experiences develop incrementally throughout early childhood, starting with sensory explorations and the development of a child’s strength, co-ordination and positional awareness through tummy time, crawling and play movement with both objects and adults. By creating games and providing opportunities for play both indoors and outdoors, adults can support children to develop their core strength, stability, balance, spatial awareness, co-ordination and agility. Gross motor skills provide the foundation for developing healthy bodies and social and emotional well-being. Fine motor control and precision helps with hand-eye co-ordination, which is later linked to early literacy. Repeated and varied opportunities to explore and play with small world activities, puzzles, arts and crafts and the practice of using small tools, with feedback and support from adults, allow children to develop proficiency, control and confidence.
The Specific Areas
Literacy: It is crucial for children to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading consists of two dimensions: language comprehension and word reading. Language comprehension (necessary for both reading and writing) starts from birth. It only develops when adults talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them, and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together. Skilled word reading, taught later, involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Writing involves transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech, before writing).
Mathematics: Developing a strong grounding in number is essential so that all children develop the necessary building blocks to excel mathematically. Children should be able to count confidently, develop a deep understanding of the numbers to 10, the relationships between them and the patterns within those numbers. By providing frequent and varied opportunities to build and apply this understanding - such as using manipulatives, including small pebbles and tens frames for organising counting - children will develop a secure base of knowledge and vocabulary from which mastery of mathematics is built. In addition, it is important that the curriculum includes rich opportunities for children to develop their spatial reasoning skills across all areas of mathematics including shape, space and measures. It is important that children develop positive attitudes and interests in mathematics, look for patterns and relationships, spot connections, ‘have a go’, talk to adults and peers about what they notice and not be afraid to make mistakes.
Understanding the world: Understanding the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community. The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. In addition, listening to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems will foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. As well as building important knowledge, this extends their familiarity with words that support understanding across domains. Enriching and widening children’s vocabulary will support later reading comprehension.
Expressive Arts and Design: The development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity. It is important that children have regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials. The quality and variety of what children see, hear and participate in is crucial for developing their understanding, self-expression, vocabulary and ability to communicate through the arts. The frequency, repetition and depth of their experiences are fundamental to their progress in interpreting and appreciating what they hear, respond to and observe.
The wording for each area has been taken from the EYFS Statutory framework 2026.
It is our statutory obligation to follow the educational programmes of study above.
