Welcome to our Early Years Foundation Stage

Here at St Martin’s, the staff and children are really proud of our Early Years Foundation Stage and love coming to school to learn. Our children are encouraged to follow their own interests, make independent choices about their learning, and are supported to develop their thinking skills through skilful adult interactions.

Learning environment

We have high expectations for all children to develop their full potential and strive for all children to become effective lifelong learners. Our provision focuses on well-being by creating a safe, supportive, and stimulating learning environment.  Our children are able: to engage through playing and exploring, to be motivated by being active in their learning and learn by being creative and thinking critically. In Reception we are lucky to have a spacious purpose built building with 2 big classrooms and a fantastic outside area that children have free access to all year long to freely explore and develop their imaginative, creative and physical skills.

As well as aiming to establish a solid foundation for future educational attainment across all 7 areas of learning, we are committed to creating healthy and happy children. We nurture emotionally intelligent children who are able to manage their emotions, aware of their thoughts and feelings, and increasingly able to choose how they adapt their actions and behaviour in different contexts.

How learning is shared

Every child in EYFS has their own ‘Learning Journey’. This is unique to every child. The adults working with your child will collect a range of evidence to add to their folders. In addition, we also document their learning through our online learning journey called Tapestry where we post pictures and comments from the school day.  Parents are also invited to add any other learning or significant experiences from home.

We track children’s progress systematically throughout the year and are able to provide different levels of intervention to ensure good progress is made towards meeting and exceeding the Early Learning Goals by the end of the Reception year. We recognise the importance of early intervention and support, particularly for disadvantaged children, and utilise the early years pupil premium where applicable to measure its impact on outcomes.

St Martin’s values diversity and ensures that all children and families are welcomed and included. We pride ourselves on fostering good relationships with parents that allows open dialogue which sets the scene for children to thrive in our Early Years setting.