EYFS Curriculum

In line with our school motto ‘Believe, Achieve, Succeed’, our principal curriculum driver is confidence that EVERY child has the opportunity to realise their full potential. We couple this with putting relationships at the core of everything we do. Children are nurtured in a safe inspirational environment that enables them to be curious and independent learners.

Our curriculum is ambitiously designed to recognise that children are unique, learning at different rates and in different styles. At Icknield, children are taught to be independent and resilient learners; we view mistakes as necessary steps in building robust mental schemas. We prioritise the cultural capital and communication skills pupils need to become educated members of society, ensuring that diversity is cherished and celebrated within our school where all are valued. The curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced to spark curiosity, allowing children to confidently try new things and deeply value the learning process.

Reception children follow the ‘Statutory Framework for the Early Years and Foundation Stage’ using Development Matters to guide our broad and balanced curriculum. Our curriculum is ambitiously designed to equip all learners particularly the most disadvantaged and those with SEND with the substantive and disciplinary knowledge they need to succeed. We view our curriculum as the progression model. It is designed and sequenced to ensure that new learning builds systematically on prior knowledge.

During ‘Discover and Do’ sessions, adult interactions are deliberately structured using the EEF ShREC approach to maximize learning opportunities within continuous provision. Practitioners intentionally Share attention and Respond to children’s choices, creating a language-rich environment. Adults purposefully Expand conversations to model and embed targeted substantive vocabulary, explicitly building early schemas in context. Through sustained back-and-forth Conversations, adults scaffold learning, check understanding, and support the transfer of communication skills into long-term memory. This systematic approach ensures highly effective, adaptive teaching that meets the needs of all learners during independent exploration

Our skillful and experienced EYFS teaching team present information clearly and promote appropriate discussion to systematically develop student understanding. We use targeted retrieval practice to shift knowledge from the working memory into long-term memory. Lessons are designed to explicitly connect new concepts to existing schemas, ensuring learning is cumulatively built over time. Curriculum delivery is highly inclusive, with agile adaptations made to ensure equity for SEND and disadvantaged learners. Continuous formative assessment checks for gaps in knowledge, ensuring no pupil is left behind before moving forward.

The impact of our curriculum is seen in confident, unique individuals who know more, remember more, and can do more. Pupils emerge as resilient, independent learners who safely experiment with new ideas and successfully develop their own cognitive connections Pupils emerge as resilient, independent learners who safely experiment with new ideas and successfully develop their own cognitive connections. Because progress is viewed as a progression model, our children are not afraid to make mistakes and actively value the process of discovery. They confidently articulate their learning, demonstrate a strong grasp of both factual components and overall skills, and are fully prepared—both socially and academically—for the next stage of their education.