EYFS Curriculum

At King Solomon Academy we place great value on the development of children as individuals and providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to prepare them for the challenges in Key Stage One and beyond. Our aim in the Early Years Foundation Stage (age 2-5) is to build strong foundations rooted in academic success as well as moral and spiritual development, so that ultimately our pupils can be successful at university, go on to be active citizens of society and happy, curious life-long learners. 

Our curriculum is therefore the cultural capital we know our pupils need so that they can gain the knowledge, skills and understanding they require for success. They can only do that if we embed the right habits for learning through the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning – Play and Exploration, Active Learning and Creative and Critical Thinking. 

Our 2-year-old provision opened in September 2021 with the aim of nurturing the health, wellbeing and intellectual development of young children and to build positive relationships with new families so that we can embed good home routines and habits for learning when it can make the biggest difference. Many of our pupils arrive well below national expectations for their age and a high proportion come from disadvantaged backgrounds and with complex needs. We teach them how to listen, speak and meet the high expectations for behaviour by working together and being kind. As such, we prioritise Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Communication and Language in the Nursery curriculum.   Our enabling environment and warm, skilful adult interactions support the children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration. As the pupils move into Reception, we invest time and energy into helping pupils set and reflect on their own goals by aiming high and developing a love of reading, writing and number.  This is delivered through a holistic curriculum which maximises opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences as well as promoting the unique child by offering extended periods of play and sustained thinking following children’s interests and ideas.  We value imagination and creativity and seek to create a sense of enjoyment and fascination in learning through a vibrant continuous indoor and outdoor provision, alongside a range of trips and visits.  Our investment in specialist teachers for music and PE mean that children continually receive valuable enrichment opportunities.  

Pupils learn through a balance of child-initiated and adult-directed activities.  The timetable is carefully structured so that children have rigorous directed teaching in English, maths and phonics everyday with regular circle time sessions to focus on Personal, Social and Emotional Development.  These sessions are followed by group work where children work with a member of staff to develop their individual targets.  This focused group time means our teachers and early years practitioners can systematically check for understanding, identify and respond to misconceptions quickly and provide real-time verbal feedback which results in a strong impact on the acquisition of new learning.  

Children are provided with plenty of time to engage in ‘exploration’ throughout the variety of experiences carefully planned to engage and challenge them in the provision. The curriculum is planned for the inside and outside classrooms and equal importance is given to learning in both areas. The curriculum is planned in a cross-curricular way to enable all aspects of the children’s development including understanding the world and expressive art and design as well as to promote sustained thinking and active learning. Intellectual preparation and co-planning are led by the Assistant Principal every week with shorter ‘child-led’ planning sessions happening throughout the week.  Planning is child led and based on observational assessment and progress toward developmental milestones. This is added to the class planning board by key workers.  During intellectual prep and weekly supervisions, the teachers reflect on three questions: “What do our focus individuals need to learn or are curious about? What embedded learning have we observed in this area?  What can be changed or adapted to exploit the learning and interests of the children/individuals in this area?”  In this way, we ensure that the children have agency over their environment and that the provision leads to depth of learning across the curriculum. 

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum.  Children follow the rigorous and highly successful Read, Write Inc program faithfully so that they meet exceptional outcomes for reading with almost all children passing the Year One phonics screening. In line with the rest of KSA, both Nursery and Reception curriculums have an overarching theme, ‘discovery’ and ‘my world’ which are chunked into big questions to explore over a half-term unit. The themes are based on foundational ideas coming from the EYFS curriculum: from “what are feelings?” as part of PSED, to “how can I save the world?” related to sustainability. From this, we have chosen multiple high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts to create an integrated approach to learning from which pupils can experience the full curriculum.   

We follow the Maths Mastery approach in Reception with an emphasis on studying key skills of number, numerical patterns and measure so that pupils develop deep understanding and the acquisition of mathematical language.  Pupils learn through games and talk tasks using concrete manipulatives which are then rehearsed and applied to their own learning during exploration. Nursery pupils begin to develop these key skills during daily maths meetings where they explore sorting, quantities, shape, number and counting awareness.  These early mathematical experiences are carefully designed to help pupils remember the content they have been taught and to support them with integrating their new knowledge across the breadth of their experiences and into larger concepts. 

Our inclusive approach means that all children learn together but we have a range of additional intervention and support to enhance and scaffold children who may not be reaching their potential or moving on children who are doing very well. This includes, for example, Talk Boost; Bucket Time to support listening and attention or additional ‘catch-up’ provision in maths.  Staff also use ‘pinny time’ which is a quick, on the spot intervention focused on sight words, blending and number retention with target individuals. The characteristics of effective learning are viewed as an integral part of all areas of learning and are reflected in our observations of children. 

Our regular monitoring of teaching and learning includes coaching and feedback from senior leaders so that all staff develop an excellent subject knowledge and are effectively supported.  We tailor our staff training to be early years specific and are focused on moderating outcomes across the phase so that every member of our team feels confident in making accurate judgements about where individual pupils are and their next steps for learning.  This is alongside bespoke sessions with our Speech and Language therapist who helps to build subject knowledge of working with children who have communication and language difficulties. 

Our curriculum needs to meet the needs of our children, including our disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND, so we spend time looking at and evaluating how children are learning.  This is achieved through talking to children, looking at their work, observing their learning experiences and analysing data and progress by year group, class, groups and individuals. Every member of staff uses ongoing observational assessment to identify children’s starting points and plan experiences which ensure progress. We check where children are attaining against the 6 monthly developmental milestones which enables us to measure their progress against a baseline.  We use this information on a weekly basis to plan learning experiences and next steps so that knowledge and skills are built cumulatively.   During each assessment window, four times a year, teachers update the progress children have made onto Smartgrade which allows us to assess the impact of teaching and evaluate whether it has been enough.   Evidence of children’s learning including observations, work samples, photographs and contributions from parents are kept in paper ‘learning journals’ which children use to reflect on their progress through pupil voice. 

Our curriculum and its delivery ensure that children make good progress. Children in our early years, on average, arrive with much lower starting points than national.  During their time in our EYFS, children make rapid progress so that we meet the national expectation for GLD at the end of the year.  Pupils also make good progress toward their age-related expectations before transitioning into Year One.  We believe our high standards are due to the enriched play-based exploration alongside the rigour of assessment and teaching the children have as they move through the early years – a rich diet of balanced learning experiences is undoubtedly the best way to develop happy, curious children.