EYFS Curriculum

At Mere Green, we believe in giving children the best possible start to school life. At the heart of the Early Years Foundation Stage is nurture and happiness. We believe that when children are nurtured and happy, success will follow.  The curriculum and care practices promote and support children’s emotional security and development of their character enabling them to thrive. We are passionate about ensuring every child has access to a high-quality early years education, one that has a key focus on communication and language development which we believe is a key driver to future success. We are committed to ensuring children leave EYFS secure in all areas of learning to equip them with the skills they need to be not only lifelong learners but learners who are ready for their next stage of development. We aim to ensure that all children in EYFS develop:

• Independence
• Ability to problem solve
• High levels of curiosity 
• Positive self esteem
• Resilience 
• Love of learning 
• The characteristics of a good friend 
• New knowledge and skills 

The EYFS curriculum at Mere Green is built around the 7 key features of effective practice:

• The best for every child
• High-quality care
• The curriculum: what we want children to learn
• Pedagogy: helping children to learn
• Assessment: checking what children have learnt
• Self-regulation and executive function
• Partnership with parents

Underpinning our approach to curriculum design is the belief that early reading, and the teaching of phonics is pivotal to children’s success. Our language rich environment where nursery rhymes and stories are a daily occurrence ensures that children are absorbed in a language rich environment. Texts have been carefully chosen to ensure children have an awareness and understanding of Diversity and Culture, Gender Equality whilst being language rich and developing awe and wonder. We firmly believe that all children, regardless of their background, deserve to have an equal chance at success. 

The curriculum in EYFS is developed so that children build on prior knowledge and learning and revisit key concepts regularly. Children learn through a mixture of focus group teaching, adult directed activities and child-initiated activities. Learning through focus group teaching is revisited in independent activities so that children retrieve prior learning and use it across different contexts. In addition to this, children are given opportunities to develop their own play and explorations through continuous provision. Adults scaffold learning to enable children to achieve things that they are unable to achieve by themselves. 

To ensure children make good progress throughout EYFS, staff are attentive and knowledgeable about each child’s starting points, progress and next steps whilst ensuring every child has access to a broad, ambitious, and balanced curriculum. Staff ensure that all children are exposed to high quality adult interactions through the use of the ShRec model, where they are engaged in high quality sustained shared thinking and back and forth interactions.

We know that different children progress at different rates and that this can impact how much children know, remember and do. This is why we believe in children ‘keeping up’ rather than ‘catching up’. Staff ensure that same day interventions take place to secure children’s knowledge and ability before moving on to a new concept/idea. In addition to this, language (through the use of Wellcomm) and phonics interventions are prioritised to ensure that every child in our EYFS develops the skills to be fluent and confident communicators and readers.

Children in our early years perform exceptionally well. You can see our Reception GLD data compared to national averages below: