PACE Early Years Curriculum

Intent and overview

Our Early Years curriculum is in line with PACE Academy Trust’s Intent, Implementation and Impact statements.

Here at Stanford, we have high expectations of all our learners and we teach our children to ‘be the best they can be’.

Our number one priority is making sure that our children are safe, happy and enjoy coming to school and Nursery each day. We ensure this by offering an Early Years curriculum that is broad, balanced and supports the children in becoming independent, inquisitive, creative, happy and honest individuals. We lay positive foundations for learning to allow our children to flourish as they move through school and beyond. Our provision is high quality, both inside and out and our planning reflects the needs and the interests of our learners. 

We recognise the challenges that many of our young children and families face and we aim to support progress and development for all, regardless of background. Many of our children enter Nursery and Reception with English as an additional language and so supporting the development of key vocabulary, language and communication skills is at the heart of all we do. We support our children with developing a love of reading for pleasure and we encourage them to engage with a variety of different activities including role-play, storytelling and small world play. Our adults are excellent models of language for our children and we offer quality first teaching and interactions for all our learners.

We pride ourselves on being a warm, welcoming and friendly school community and having great relationships with our families is very important to us. We recognise that parents and carers are a child’s first and foremost educator and we therefore strive to develop excellent parental partnerships. One of the ways we make this happen is using the assessment tool ‘Evidence Me’ to stay connected and update our parents on their child’s learning and development. We also promote regular communication through daily conversations, updates, emails and notes in reading journals. We support our non-English speaking parents by translating our communications into home languages and offering translators where possible.

Throughout a child’s time in the Early Years, we build up a profile of their learning and development using summative and formative assessment strategies, including teacher knowledge, online observations on Evidence Me, work in learning journals and conversations with parents. We use the statements and objectives in Development Matters, 2021 to support and guide our judgements. At the end of a child’s time in Reception, we make a judgement of a ‘Good Level of Development’ (GLD) by assessing them against the Early Learning Goals (pages 11-14).