Clifton Vision – Let Your Light Shine
Our vision reflects everything we strive for; the best for our children. Our children’s best interests are at the heart of everything. At Clifton CE Primary we recognise and value each child’s individual strengths, talents and diversity and seek to encourage their full potential. We embrace our children as individuals. In Reception, we work collaboratively with the community we serve to ensure we nurture our pupils, thus allowing our children to grow, which will enable them to succeed and ‘Let their Light Shine’.
Clifton Whole School Values
We believe our values underpin everything we do in School. They are like a thread running through each of us, through each class, which ties us together. Throughout a child’s educational journey at Clifton, they will be taught to practice these values in everyday life beginning in the foundation stage;
Generosity
Compassion
Courage
Forgiveness
Friendship
Respect
Thankfulness
Trust
Perseverance
Justice
Service
Truthfulness
We regard every child as unique. We regard each child as constantly learning and that each child can become resilient, capable, confident, self-assured.
We prioritise positive relationships in order for each child to become strong and independent. There is a strong partnership between our staff and parents.
We provide a rich, enabling environment ensuring each child can learn and develop well by providing experiences that respond to our children’s needs based on what they already know and that are clearly sequenced and progressive.
We recognise that each child develops and learns in different ways and at different rates (characteristics of effective teaching and learning).
We use development matters to underpin the teaching and learning in early years combined with a self-created curriculum tailored to the needs of the children.
Areas of Learning:
The seven important and interconnected areas of learning and development shape our provision. We regard the three prime areas as particularly crucial for igniting children’s curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, and for building their capacity to learn, form relationships and thrive.
• Communication and language development:
We give children opportunities to experience a rich language environment; to develop their confidence and skills in expressing themselves; and to speak and listen in a range of situations demonstrating a good understanding. Through our overarching topics, a broad and varied vocabulary is taught and the children are encouraged to explore this within their play.
• Physical development:
We provide opportunities for young children to be active and interactive; and to develop their co-ordination, control, and movement. We help children to understand the importance of physical activity and to make healthy choices in relation to food.
• Personal, social and emotional development: We help children to develop a positive sense of themselves, and others; to form positive relationships and develop respect for others; to develop social skills and learn how to manage their feelings; to understand appropriate behaviour in groups; and to have confidence in their own abilities.
Our provision also supports children in four specific areas, through which the three prime areas are strengthened and applied. The specific areas are:
• Literacy: We encourage children to link sounds and letters and to begin to read and write. Children are given access to a wide range of reading materials (books, poems, and other written materials) to ignite their interest. These are often located amongst play set ups.
• Mathematics: We provide children with opportunities to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using numbers, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems; and to describe shapes, spaces, and measure.
• Understanding the world: We guide children to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment.
• Expressive arts and design: We enable children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials, as well as providing opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, imagination, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, roleplay, and design and technology.
We continually assess children’s attainment and progress using the Development Matters stages of development. We consider, children’s term of birth to ensure children are on track for typical development. Where children are not on track for achieving the 17 Early Learning Goals, we target children’s needs and provide the necessary interventions whether this is through direct teaching, linked provision, continuous or enhanced provision.
We consider the needs, interests, and stage of development of each child and use this information to plan a challenging, progressive and highly motivating curriculum in all of the areas of learning and development.
The Importance of Play:
Each area of learning is implemented through planned, purposeful play and through a mix of adultled, adult directed and child-initiated activity. We regard play as essential for children’s development, building their confidence as they learn to explore, to think about problems, and relate to others. We strongly believe that children learn by leading their own play, and by taking part in play which is also guided by adults. We make ongoing judgements about the balance between activities led by children, and activities led or guided by adults. As children progress through the year this balance gradually shifts towards more activities led by adults and direct teaching, to help children prepare for more formal learning, ready for Year 1.
How we Provide for a Thinking Environment / Characteristics of Effective Learning:
Our stimulating environment offers high quality provision consisting of small world, role play, construction, outdoor, malleable materials – playdough, water, sand, model making, painting, mud kitchen, den building (weather permitting) bikes, outdoor resources. Mark making is incorporated in every area. The environment is fluid, however resources can be taken from one area to another in order to develop schema.
In planning and guiding children’s activities we reflect on the different ways that children learn. These underpin our provision. The three characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:
• Playing and exploring: Children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’. Our environment allows children to play freely but also supports learning through implicit and explicit challenge (see below). Opportunities for exploring are in every area of our provision. Resources that encourage creativity that are ambiguous are: planks, tyres, crates, wooden bricks, boxes, den building materials – blankets, sheets, pegs.
• Active learning: Children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements. We encourage children to be active learners by creating an environment led by their interests. We believe high level attainment comes from high level engagement and that learning should be process (skill) driven rather than outcome driven.
Engagement in the process ensures the knowledge is more likely to stick.
• Creating and thinking critically: Children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas and develop strategies for doing things. We give lots of opportunities to problem solve and work things out supported by an adult who scaffolds and models thinking. We also provide opportunities for children to investigate and problem solve independently.
We plan our continuous provision to continue the provision for learning ‘with an adult’ and ‘in the absence of an adult’. It is directly linked to children’s progress and attainment and focussed on procedural knowledge / skill development. We enhance the provision by selecting resources and activities to meet the children’s developmental needs; resources provided are differentiated / levelled. Activities are ‘dressed’ to children’s motivations and interests. We also ensure that adults are not constantly leading group activities. Adults observe children’s learning in the continuous provision and also teach, support and scaffold children’s learning through their play.
We follow a topic approach, which is mainly adult led; but the topic does not limit the children’s learning in the activities and experiences provided in our continuous provision although topic enhancements may be added. We have generic continuous provision plans to show the possible learning for each area, and weekly enhanced provision plans which outline the ‘enhancements’ for specific areas.
How we Ensure Challenge:
Implicit challenge throughout our environment is achieved by:
· Structuring and resourcing the environment linked directly to summative assessment and differentiating / levelling the provision to reflect the children’s current development.
· Providing ambiguity. We are developing our open ended resources and experiences are provided that encourage children to explore and investigate.
Explicit challenge is adult led and is achieved by:
· Providing adult prompts or asking specific children to carry out a particular task (informal challenge).
· We have challenge activities (bronze star challenge) put out and the expectation that children complete them.
How we use Assessment:
Assessment is key in recognising our children’s progress, understanding their needs and planning activities and support.
· Ongoing assessment (formative assessment) is an integral part of the learning and development process. We observe and interact with children in daily activities to understand their level of achievement, interests and learning styles. Embedded learning is identified by assessing what a child can do consistently and independently in a range of everyday situations.
· Summative assessment is completed at least 3 times per year (Late September / October; December; April) to understand a child’s performance at the end of a period of teaching.
· National statutory summative assessment is carried out at the end of the year in order to understand a child’s performance in relation to national expectations.
Our whole environment is shaped by assessment. Hence, our quality provision has a direct relationship with the needs of the children. It is adjusted to enable each child to demonstrate their learning and development fully.
We shape learning experiences for each child responding to:
our day-to day observations about children’s progress.
our knowledge of the strengths and areas for development identified through summative assessment.
How we Monitor Children’s Well-Being:
We monitor the well-being of our children through the Leuven Scales of Well-being and Involvement. We strongly believe that if children aren’t positively engaging and involved, learning will be hindered. We use the Leuven scales during baseline assessment.
The Importance of Highly Skilled Staff:
We firmly believe that quality EYFS provision requires a quality workforce. We have a well-qualified, skilled staff to ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for children. We are knowledgeable about the 7 areas of learning and understand how young children learn. We regard ourselves as ‘facilitators of thinking’, constantly look for opportunities to question, model and scaffold strategies and ideas using the Development Matters Stage of Development as a guide.
We expect the vast majority of children to achieve the 17 Early Learning Goals which summarise the knowledge, skills and understanding that all young children should have gained by the end of the Reception year in the seven areas of learning and development. Our EYFS provision ‘gives children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life’.