EYFS
Introducing the EYFS to parents and carers
Our nurseries and preschools follow the government based framework for early learning called the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS).
What is the EYFS?
The EYFS is the Early Years Foundation stage, which is the framework that all childcare settings will have been following from September 2008. All out nurseries have been preparing for the EYFS by providing training for all staff members.
What is the EYFS replacing?
The EYFS has replaced Birth to Three Matters, Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage and the National Daycare standards for daycare and childminding of children aged less than eight years.
What has changed within the nursery?
The staff have been using new planning sheets although the method of short, medium and long term will be exactly the same. Children’s tracker books have been up dated in line with EYFS. The nursery will now plan under six areas of learning:
- personal, social and emotional development
- communication, language and literacy
- problem solving, reasoning and numeracy
- knowledge and understanding of the world
- physical development
- creative development
Children will also have a back up Key Carer when their own key carer in on holiday.
What is the aim of the EYFS?
The overarching aim of the EYFS is to help young children achieve the five every child matters outcomes of staying safe, being healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well – being by:
- setting the standards – ensuring that every child makes progress and that no child gets left behind
- providing for equality of opportunity – ensuring that every child is being included and not disadvantaged because of ethnicity, culture or religion, home language, family background, learning difficulties or disabilities, gender or ability.
- creating the framework for parents working – between parents and professionals and between all the settings that the child attends
- improving quality and consistency – ending the distinction between care and learning in the existing frameworks, providing the basis for the inspection and regulation regime
- laying a secure foundation for future learning – through learning and development that is planned around the individual needs and interests of the child, and informed by the use of ongoing observational assessment
Introduction to EYFS
The EYFS is broken up into themes, principles and commitments
The four themes are:
- a unique child
- positive relationships
- enabling environments
- learning and development
The four principles of the EYFS are:
- A unique child – every child is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confident and self assured.
- Positive relationships – children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships with parents and / or a key person.
- Enabling environments – the environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children’s development and learning.
- Learning and development – children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates and all areas of learning and development are equally imported and inter-connected.
Each principle is supported by four commitments which describe how the principle can be put into practice.
How will this benefit my child?
All our nurseries have developed further training sessions and materials to develop staff even further. We believe this will benefit all children as we have invested heavily in child development training and Delivering Excellence training has been ongoing since March 2008 and will continue throughout 2009.
We have developed a quality audit to enable our team of nursery managers to audit how effective these changes are and offer further support and training throughout these changes.
We have taken the EYFS changes as an opportunity to share excellent practice across the company and we are already seeing the benefits.
Will this affect parents and how can we get involved?
The EYFS has a clear statement that all parents should be encouraged to be involved in this curriculum and the nurseries have been keeping all parents informed using newsletters and at handovers.
We value all feedback and ideas so please join us in our offering to offer the very best childcare always putting children at the very heart of what we do.
This is just an introduction for you to understand what the EYFS involves and what changes will be made over the next few months.
To order a free EYFS pack, call 08456 055 560
