Curriculum & Assessment

What is a curriculum?

A curriculum is what we want the children to learn in the time they are with us at nursery. It is unique to our setting and is tailored to meet the needs of our children. The diversity of the cohort may change from year to year so it is important that the curriculum also changes with the children’s emerging needs.

It must be based on the statutory early years foundation stage (EYFS), which gives us a framework that we can build on, through 7 areas of learning. These are:

How did we plan our curriculum?

We started with the EYFS framework. The seven areas listed above are high-level curriculum summaries that we must follow and work into a format that meets the needs of our children.

From there, we broke down those high-level curriculum summaries into smaller steps. We decided what we wanted children to learn, the activities we wanted to do with them and how we would support their learning to ensure every child has a chance to thrive.

We used ‘Development Matters’ the non-statutory curriculum guidance for the early years foundation stage to support our planning of the curriculum. We ensured that every goal allowed us to have coverage of the 7 areas of learning and the developmental milestones children should achieve whilst with us.

We watched the children, studying how they lead their own play. We talked to parents and carers to find out their interests. We asked the staff what they had observed and what key skills they notice that our children have and need to thrive.

We decided on the below 8 goals to focus on. Primarily this is achieved through play and a carefully planned ‘book of the week’. Both are given in this document for your reference.

Please see the document below for full information about our curriculum policy & goals.