The EYFS practice guidance booklet offers detailed explanations of how to use the different elements of the whole EYFS document and explains the synergy between the principles and the support required for children's learning in the six specific areas.
Following the example of the introduction to Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, the new practice guidance for EYFS emphasises the role of effective practitioners in creating challenging and stimulating environments and the importance of adult interaction to improve outcomes for children's learning.
The practice guidance should be seen as essential support for practitioners as it will remind them about children's stages of development from birth to five years, and will explain how these are linked to the acquisition of knowledge and skills in each area of learning.
The intention is to promote best practice through careful observation and assessment of children's achievement and behaviour and to provide guidance to develop planning and support to extend learning. Section 1
The introduction to the booklet is a useful reminder about the contents of the EYFS and how it should be implemented in settings. The emphasis is placed on the key issues that should guide the delivery of the curriculum.
The key issues section mirrors the general points in the introduction to Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage by concentrating on conditions that need to be met for delivering an effective early years service.
The responsibility to meet the diverse needs of children lies at the heart of all programmes and emphasises the need to gain a deep and informed knowledge of each child and develop personalised planning that supports developmental progression.
The focus is on promoting positive attitudes to the diversity and richness of the society in which we live and grasping the significance of challenging any expression of discrimination or prejudice by children or adults.
The framework makes adults responsible for eradicating inequalities and meeting the needs of children with identified special needs and learning difficulties and for offering suitable challenges for gifted children.
Partnership working with parents - the framework acknowledges that parents and carers are children's first and most influential teachers and that it is critical to involve them in supporting children's development. Only through regular sharing of information and discussion with parents, can children be properly supported to gain knowledge and skills at home and in the early years setting.
Flexible provision - practitioners need to be flexible in approach and planning, particularly bearing in mind that children may attend a combination of early years and childcare services. They should consider how to support transition from one service to another and to share relevant information across services to support the needs of individual children and their parents. Children have different concentration spans and activities need to engage their attention, not drill them in skills and knowledge.
Play - play must underpin all aspects of delivery of the EYFS, as children learn through active engagement in experiences. The focus is firmly placed on providing challenges indoors and outside in equal measure and ensuring that children have free-flow access to both locations for most of the day.
It cannot be overstated how important this commitment to play must be for practitioners. Their interaction with children should support learning and the acquisition of knowledge and skills through play. It is in this context that the definition of pedagogue is best understood. Adults should help unlock learning for children and acts as facilitators in children's continuous and progressive development from birth to five years.
There are several crucial aspects to this role that need to be understood:
- Observing and reflecting on children's spontaneous play and the structured play experience that is provided for them
- Planning, resourcing and enabling safe, stimulating and imaginative play environments
- Supporting and extending the acquisition of language and useful communication skills through both child-initiated and adult-directed play
- Developing exciting and challenging experiences that enable children to make sense of the world, to practise skills, to explore ideas and concepts and to learn the need for rules to guide their behaviour and self-expression
- Encouraging children to think creatively as they explore the natural and man-made worlds.
Quality improvement - this responsibility refers to the importance of early years staff being aware of the need to be reflective about their practice. They must make continuous efforts to ensure that they share knowledge and expertise within their setting, with parents and other agencies. They must be focused on helping improve outcomes for children's learning and on the impact their behaviour and techniques have on achieving the expectations embedded in the EYFS. Practitioners must be mindful of the duty to prepare children for future attainment in Key Stage 1 and beyond.
Emphasis is on quality improvement being sustained through:
1. Staff being well qualified and committed to ongoing personal development
2. Management and leadership skills developing policies, procedures and governance that supports high quality service delivery
3. Sustained shared thinking that supports children's ongoing acquisition of knowledge and understanding, language and memory
4. Monitoring and assessment systems and data that are manageable and make a real contribution to developing effective planning
Transition, continuity and coherence - this is a reminder about children's future learning as they make the transition to Key Stage 1. Early years practitioners are expected to be knowledgeable about the subsequent steps in learning so that they can positively influence children's progress and help parents support children through transition arrangements to the next class or educational setting at the end of the EYFS.
Section 3
This is a brief guide to the welfare requirements and explains how they make an impact on the delivery of an effective and safe early years service.
The various areas are all covered in the statutory guidance for EYFS and the welfare requirements are related to the principles into practice cards. This detailed information is particularly useful as it provides an insight into how some aspects of the welfare requirements influence the provision of children's outcomes for learning. The areas covered in this section are:
- Safeguarding and promoting welfare
- Key person
- Suitable people
- Staffing arrangements to ensure safety and to meet the needs of children
- Children attending reception classes
- Examples of staff to child ratios in mixed-aged groups
- Suitable premises, environment and equipment
- Documentation.
These are followed by a useful glossary of terms employed throughout the document which should help practitioners familiarise themselves with jargon introduced in the new document. As always, it pays to read everything several times, until a thorough understanding is achieved.
Appendix 1 provides useful information to support practitioners exploring the criteria for effective paediatric first-aid training. Use this as a checklist for buying training courses from training providers and to remind staff about what they must know to protect children's health and safety.
Appendix 2 explains in detail the content of the six areas of learning and development. This part of the guidance is designed to support practitioners to 'observe, plan and assess activities' for children, starting from the point of view that every child is an individual and therefore different.
For the most part, the areas of learning and early learning goals in each section have not changed and will be familiar to practitioners who have worked with the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage. However, one of the areas of learning - mathematical development - has been renamed. It is now called problem solving, reasoning and numeracy. There is no longer a reference to the 'stepping stones' as described in the previous document to indicate the stages of progress that children make towards the early learning goals.
For each area of learning in this section, a short introduction indicates what practitioners should think about in relation to what the area means for children and how the principles for the EYFS affect these outcomes. This is a very useful aspect of the guidance and places the area of learning in context with other parts of the document, and in particular with the practice cards.
This introduction reminds practitioners what they need to do with children and how they should behave with them. Putting these ideas into practice will be the hardest element for many settings as the emphasis is on the adults creating and sustaining a child-centred environment in which adults act as facilitators for learning.
For example, in 'positive relationships' under communication, language and literacy, adults are expected to 'give daily opportunities to share and enjoy a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, rhymes, music, songs, poetry and stories'. Although many settings provide a book area, read stories and sing songs and rhymes to children, only a minority of providers offer poetry or a good range of non-fiction books. It is hoped that this detailed shopping list of language experience will inspire practitioners to offer a more imaginative and broader selection of literature.
There is a focus, under the principle 'learning and development', on the importance of showing sensitivity to children's different forms of expressing themselves and making themselves understood. It is all too easy to ignore the signs of an introverted and shy child, so practitioners are expected to use a variety of communication methods to engage children's interest and attention. This new way of working will pose challenges to staff who are not sufficiently in tune with children.
The content of the areas of learning has been reorganised to cover development from birth to five years. The progress children make in each area is represented on charts that emphasise how adults should observe, assess and plan activities to meet each learning goal. Each chart is divided into four columns so that practitioners can read across the guidance and plan sensitively for children's development according to individual needs:
- Development matters
- Look, listen and note
- Effective practice
- Planning and resourcing
This system of supporting assessment and planning emphasises the need for practitioners to think about what each of their key children has achieved. In this context individual play plans are likely to be most effective in supporting children's learning. A play plan focuses on a child's particular area of interest and level of development so that it is more likely that each child progresses at their own pace in learning. Whole group plans, in contrast, focus on the common denominator and do not meet the needs of all children. The difficulty for practitioners is to make record-keeping simple and up-to-date so that related play plans are current and make achievable demands on children. Making the notion of the key worker system effective relies on this process of supporting individual children.
Part 4: Nursery World, 23 August
The EYFS framework
The Children's Act 2006 places on local authorities the duty to be 'market managers' of childcare in their area and to ensure that parents are offered consistent high-quality provision and information across all childcare services.
The Act also outlines how the new regulatory framework for childcare providers, the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), will be the means by which services will be assessed. This subsequent guidance, published in May 2007, explains what childcare providers are expected to do.
The programme for delivering the new framework incorporates three previous guidance documents:
- the National Standards for Daycare
- the Birth to Three Matters framework
- the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage.
Overall, the new guidance comprises four sections:
- the statutory framework
- the principles into practice cards
- the practice guidance for the EYFS
- the DVD resources for providers and practitioners.
The Department for Education and Skills has introduced the framework during this current term and expects local authorities to train all staff working with children under five years old over the next year. The aim is to have the new framework fully in place by September 2008.
SECTION 2: LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
This section explains the issues related to learning and development, as expressed in the principles into practice cards and the development and planning charts in each area of learning in Appendix 2. It is designed to help practitioners handle the information in the charts and cards and to use them to inform best practice.
The information covered in this section is useful because it emphasises key principles that appear as bullet points on the cards. It explains how the learning development charts and the cards work in tandem.
There is an overview of the learning and development guidance with the crucial reminder that 'examples of types of activities and experiences that children might be involved in as they progress and the continuous assessment that practitioners must undertake' should not be used as mere checklists.
The five columns on the charts in Appendix 2: Areas for Learning and Development, encourage practitioners to think about the developmental stage of each child in each area of learning and how they must provide suitable experiences to stimulate development and progression. These themes are duplicated on the principles into practice cards.
1. On the charts, the first column shows the rising ages of children which deliberately overlap to reflect that children develop at different rates.
2. 'Development matters' is all about the progression of skills and knowledge acquisition at each stage
3. 'Look, listen and note' is about helping practitioners focus on and assess the progress that children make as they grow.
4. 'Effective practice' is about using the knowledge of children to plan effective experiences that support children's ongoing and future achievement
5. 'Planning and resources' is about demonstrating that good planning and using resources well is crucial to supporting children's learning.
6. 'Assessment' (on the principles into practice cards) emphasises how using well-managed systems of assessing development are essential in the effort to establish successful continuity in learning.
Assessment should include formative assessment that 'informs and guides everyday planning' and summative assessment that 'makes statements about a child's achievements' over a long, extended period.
The EYFS profile is a summative assessment that shows a child's progression in learning at the end of the EYFS.
CONCLUSIONS
As practitioners become more familiar with the different parts of the EYFS document, they will understand how much each overlaps with the next and will realise that there are particular elements of their own performance and practice that are being challenged in every section.
This is a document that should act as a catalyst for change in so far as it advocates principles and practice that are completely child-centred.
The practice guidance for the EYFS is probably the most comprehensive element of the guidance document because it includes such detailed information on children's progress from birth to five years. Settings should focus on the guidance to ensure that their staff are making informed decisions about how to assess and plan for children's development. It is important to remember, however, that children's progress is not finite and that the statements on progression are generalised in the extreme. Practitioners will still have to use their own knowledge and experience of child development and elicit helpful information from parents about their children.
The main weakness of development charts is that they may limit the expectations of adults working with children. The document should be used in conjunction with a wide range of other child development guidance in childcare books, on the internet and in Nursery World.
Experienced practitioners know they should use the guidance to establish best practice in supporting children's progress in each area of learning. They realise that areas of learning overlap and that they can support children most effectively with a highly challenging and stimulating environment. A relaxed context in which children arrive at their own decisions, where learning both captivates and enthuses them, is what all practitioners should be working towards.
- Lena Engel, early years education specialist.
