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School context
Our school is a large school and serves one of the most deprived areas of the county. We have over 100 children accessing our early years provision with many entering at 2 years old. I am an experienced early years leader and oversee a large staff team. I have not wanted to implement too many initiatives over the past couple of years due to changes in senior leadership. We are currently awaiting appointment of a new permanent headteacher.
Provision for 2-year-olds
The curriculum and provision for 2-year-olds is our priority. When we initially joined the project, we had two new practitioners overseeing the provision and the long-term planning was provided by me. This was not an ideal situation, and consequently activities for the children were often planned around topics rather than experiences and were often adult-led, pitched too high and delivered quite formally. External experts had supported us with the development of our environment, but this resulted in a much more ‘schoolified’ space that did not reflect the diverse needs of our children.
The project has enabled me to speak with other leaders and teachers with 2-year-old provision and unpick what makes a meaningful curriculum and what constitutes appropriate pedagogy and space for this age phase.
Creating a bespoke and meaningful curriculum
When working with the rest of the team I introduced some of the exercises undertaken during the project training sessions and chose firstly to explore progressive steps and learning sequences for the 2-year-olds. However, we soon found that we were picking out tiny developmental steps and it felt that we were making our curriculum for such young children too prescriptive and unmanageable. We use Development Matters to help shape our understanding of learning and development and decided that our best approach would be to revisit the context of our intake and our vision, values and aspirations for these children.
Empowered to ensure a bespoke curriculum that was meaningful for our children, I led staff sessions revisiting our vision and values for children. Selecting keywords, we then focused on what our aspirations would be for children by the end of the 2-year-old provision in relation to each value and associated keywords. This gave us our end-of-phase goals.
We collated these end-of-phase goals and time was then spent exploring how we supported children from on-entry towards these goals. I suppose our main focus was end of phase ambitions and then appropriate pedagogy to support children in achieving these. In our meetings we focused on specific children, unpicking our knowledge of them and what may be appropriate strategies in supporting them move towards the end-of-phase ambitions. This included discussions about where children were and what would be appropriate for them next, so, less formally we were addressing learning sequences.
Working with parents and breaking down barriers
Beginning curriculum design and implementation by focusing on values also led to an exploration of how we worked with parents. In our context, working in partnership with families is an ongoing challenge and unfortunately parents are often reluctant to engage with education in the early years. We knew there was a need to break down barriers. Through discussion and exploration of this area it was felt that we needed to ensure that the transition from home to the 2-year-old provision needed to involve as little change for children (and parents) as possible. The environment needed to reflect the ‘home’ rather than a school setting. So, again we looked at our provision and adapted as appropriate. We also built-up stronger connections with the family hub and community, and have added enrichment experiences to our curriculum offer where parents are encouraged to join us.
An empowered team
Because of our approach in addressing the curriculum design and implementation for our 2-year-olds, staff are quickly getting to know children at a deeper, more purposeful level. They are beginning to feel empowered in making decisions for the good of the child, not just because someone has told them to do something, or they have found a ‘nice’ activity. It is beginning to make sense to staff! Impact can be seen in their adaptions to the learning environment and quality of planned experiences. Some provision has been stripped back to enable children to access more independently and with much more focus.
Our next steps
Our journey is not over, in fact it is just beginning, but being part of the project has, so far, given us confidence in what we need to provide, autonomy in making decisions about how best to approach this and the ability to articulate our offer more succinctly. We look forward to what is yet to come!
Key takeaways
- Tapping into your vision, values and aspirations for the particular cohort of children helps in creating a sequenced, bespoke and meaningful curriculum.
- Focusing on a wider vision can ensure your curriculum is not too prescriptive
- Planning for individual children’s needs should be embedded into the wider curriculum planning for each cohort
- Working with the local community is a valuable way in trying to break down barriers to parental involvement
Critical considerations
- Can you identify your values as a team and your overall vision for the group of children?
- Does your environment reflect the diverse needs of the particular cohort of children?
- Do you/does the team feel empowered to make decisions and understand the ‘why’ behind the decisions?
- Do you work with your local community to try break down barriers to parent partnerships? Is there more that you could do here?
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