Early Years Foundation Stage
Intent
At St Augustine’s CE Academy, we provide our children with a curriculum that is designed to be flexible, engaging and exciting so that their unique needs, passions and interests are embraced.
Our curriculum is designed to recognise children’s prior learning, both from previous settings and their experiences at home. We work in close partnership with parents, carers and other settings to provide the best possible start, ensuring each child reaches their full potential from their individual starting points. Our curriculum has been designed to enable children to succeed through cooperative and collaborative learning principles. As such, there is a strong emphasis on the Prime Areas of learning; Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Communication and Language and Physical Development and for all children to develop a rich and varied vocabulary.
We work within a two year rolling curriculum which includes a new theme and an overarching question every half term. These questions run through from Early Years to Year 4 allowing progression of knowledge and skills.
At St Augustine’s, we recognise that Oracy not only improves academic outcomes, but is a life skill to ensure success beyond school, in life and future employment. Oracy develops children’s thinking and understanding, which in turn promotes self-confidence, resilience and empathy which support the child’s well-being. Our enabling environments and warm, timely and skilful adult interactions support the children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration right from the start of their learning journey. We believe that high level engagement ensures high level attainment. We therefore provide an engaging curriculum that 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. We follow children’s interests and ideas to foster a lifelong love of learning both in and outside of school.
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. By the end of the Reception year our intent is to ensure that all children make at least good progress from their starting points and are equipped with the skills and knowledge to have a smooth transition into Year 1.
