IMPORTANT UPDATE: Our FS2 Curriculum

Dear FS2 Parents and Carers,

We would like to share some more information about the curriculum we follow in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS).

Our curriculum planning is guided by a framework called ‘Development Matters’ that sets out the learning, development and assessment requirements for all children until the end of their reception year. All early years practitioners are required to pursue daily rich activities to support each child’s educational development across seven areas of learning.

This guidance has been reviewed and the goals for the end of reception year have been updated.

At St John Fisher we are always keen to be at the forefront of any changes in education and we are excited to become an ‘early adoption’ school before the statutory implementation in September 2021.

The reforms bring about some exciting changes and if you have had a child who has been in reception in recent years things may look a little different on Tapestry. However, the EYFS framework has never prescribed a particular teaching approach and the new framework holds true to this value. Our philosophy of early year’s education remains the same with play and wellbeing at the heart of everything we do.

You can find the detailed ‘EYFS early adopter framework- Development Matters’ document by clicking the link below:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/914443/Development_Matters_-_Non-statutory_curriculum_guidance_for_the_early_years_foundation_stage__1_.pdf

In the final term of the year, a profile will be completed for your child. This provides parents and carers, practitioners and teachers with a well-rounded picture of a child’s knowledge, understanding and abilities, their attainment against expected levels, and their readiness for year 1. Throughout their year in Reception, the children will be observed and assessed through their play in order to gain insights and make reasonable judgements against the early learning goals. We will use the terms ‘emerging’ or ‘expected’ to describe our judgements, under the new guidance the term ‘exceeding’ has been removed.

Early Years – What is Early Adopter Status?

At the end of their Reception year we assess your children and decide if they have met a set of early learning goals in different areas of learning. The government has decided to change the early learning goals that we use to assess your child and has offered schools the chance to adopt the new early learning goals one year early, in September 2020.

Our school has decided to become an early adopter school and from this year we will be using the new early learning goals to assess your children at the end of their Reception year. New guidance to support learning over the Reception year has been released alongside these new early learning goals, this is called Development Matters. Development Matters is not a checklist of things that your child should do, rather it is guidance for adults who work with children, to help them to support and embed your child’s learning journey.

What does this mean for your child?

Nothing will change for your child. We will continue to offer them the highest quality learning experiences in school and we will continue to develop the whole child, thinking about how they learn and who they are as individuals. We hope that your child is unaware that anything different is going on, it is definitely business as usual for them!

What does this mean for parents / carers?

Nothing will change for parents/carers. We will continue to support you to the best of our ability and value your opinions and knowledge of your child. We will still use Tapestry to record your child’s learning journey. Many of you may want to see the new goals and guidance and links to these are at the bottom of this letter.

What does this mean for early years teachers?

Our teachers have studied the changes and new guidance closely and are quickly becoming experts in what is expected of your child. We are working hard to baseline your children and will release those results to you in the next couple of weeks. At the end of the year we will still use our knowledge of your child, alongside some evidence we have gathered throughout the year, to make judgements about whether they have met their early learning goals. This year the Local Authority will not moderate our judgements. We would hope that the government will ask our opinion of the changes they have made and that we can help to inform the future of early years education.

Please come and talk to us if you have any questions, worries or concerns about this!

We hope that this letter has provided you with the relevant information regarding the early adopter year. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the EYFS team via our class email.

Kindest regards,

Mrs Darken and the FS2 team