Child Development & Learning

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) was introduced in September 2008 and is a framework for children from birth through to five years old that sets out minimum standards of care and learning for all nursery practice ensuring that all children’s welfare, learning and development needs are met.

Its purpose is to ensure that children are provided with a rich learning experience tailored to their individual needs whilst being cared for in a safe and secure environment. These goals are grouped into seven areas of learning:

Learning Journey Files

The setting keeps a Learning Journey for each child. Staff and parents working together on their children's Learning Journey is one of the ways in which the key person and parents work in partnership. Your child's Learning Journey record of achievement helps us to celebrate together her/his achievements and to work together to provide what your child needs for her/his well-being and to make progress.

Your child's key person will work with you to keep this record. To do this you and she/he will collect information about your child's needs, activities, interests and achievements. This information will enable the key person to identify your child's stage of progress. You and the key person will then decide on how to help your child to move on to the next stage.

As a nursery, our practitioners continually observe, listen to and assess the children in our care. This enables us to record their learning and then to plan activities and provide resources that will extend each individual child’s learning and development.

We recognise that parents and carers are their child’s first teachers and seek to work in partnership with parents to gather as much information about the child as possible so that we can then use all of the information gained to plan for the individual children in a way that will extend their learning and development.