EYFS

At Queensgate Primary School, our Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) provides children with the strong foundations they need to grow, learn, and thrive. Through play-based learning and carefully planned experiences, children develop essential skills across all areas of learning, from communication and language to physical development and early literacy and numeracy. We focus on nurturing curiosity, independence, and a love of learning, while also supporting social skills, resilience, and confidence. With a rich, stimulating environment and caring adults, pupils are encouraged to explore, create, and collaborate—building the skills that will support their future education and everyday life.

A Message from Mrs Barnett, our EYFS Leader

At Queensgate, our Early Years teachers aim for the children in Reception to:

• Engage in rich play and learning experiences in an inviting and stimulating environment, both indoors and outdoors.
• Be independent learners who are confident to take risks in their play and learn from their mistakes.
• Continue to develop their abilities to work as part of a team.
• Be able to follow our Queensgate Code, helping them to learn how to be polite, kind and a good listener.

Intent

At Queensgate we offer rich and varied experiences that are based on and planned around the children’s prior learning and next steps. There is a strong emphasis on supporting children’s communication and personal, social and emotional development. We believe that for children to become effective learners they must be able to approach opportunities with courage, resilience, independence and curiosity. In order for this to be possible, children need to be nurtured within an environment where they feel secure enough to take risks and embrace mistakes. Therefore we provide the children in our care with uninterrupted meaningful play opportunities within our enabling environment. Our team interact purposefully with the children to support and extend their learning and thinking.By the end of the Reception year our intent is to ensure that all children make good progress from their starting points. We aim to equip the children with the skills and knowledge to be independent lifelong learners.

Implementation

Each half term, EYFS staff introduce a new theme to provide inspiration for learning across all areas of the curriculum, whilst providing the flexibility for children to follow their own interests and ideas. The children at Queensgate learn through a balance of child-initiated and adult-directed opportunities. 

Our planning is carefully structured so that children have explicit Phonics and Maths teaching every day. 

In Literacy we follow The Teach Hub Phonics Programme to ensure consistency across the school. Children are encouraged to read at home on a daily basis and are listened to at school regularly. 

In Maths we follow the Number Sense Maths which is focused on developing the following Mathematical skills; subitising, partitioning, a deep understanding of quantities to 10, spatial awareness and positive attitudes.

To encourage children to take risks and embrace mistakes we plan for the children to receive weekly Forest School sessions. These sessions also support our identified areas of need –Communication and Language and Personal, Social and Emotional Development.

At Queensgate we ensure that all children feel included by learning together, but we do have a range of interventions in place to support children to reach their full potential.

Our EYFS team instinctively know when to step back and observe children’s play and when to step in and move the children’s learning forward. We record the children’s ‘wow’ moments using Class Dojo. We also use Class Dojo to work in partnership with parents and carers.

Our regular monitoring of teaching and learning in Reception includes: lesson observations, constructive feedback from the Early Years Advisory Team, Early Years network meetings and visiting other EYFS settings to observe good practice.

Impact

The impact of our EYFS curriculum is reflected in the children being courageous, resilient, independent and curious learners as they transition into Year One. We strive for children to reach the Early Learning Goals at the end of Reception.

We measure progress and children’s learning across the year through formative and summative assessments which are based on the team’s knowledge of the children, observations and professional discussions about the children. These are used to inform us of the children’s next steps.

Phonic and Maths assessments are carried out each half term to identify gaps in learning and to ensure our teaching meets the needs of the children. 

We use ClassDojo learning journals, supplemented with individual folders in Reception, which reflect the successes of the children throughout their time in Early Years.