The purpose of EYFS is to ensure that every child has the best possible start to their education and to enable each child to fulfil their potential. A child’s experience in the early years has a major impact on their future life chances.

At Francis Askew we ensure that we have a safe, secure and stimulating environment both indoor and outdoor in which children can explore; make choices; ask questions; extend their skills and develop confidence.

Happy children learn best so we plan activities that are challenging and fun. We encourage children to be independent and resources are well organized and labelled so children can access what they need.

Staff join in with children’s learning, extending their language and thinking at the child’s level and help them to make progress.

We encourage children to use their curiosity and imagination in this supported environment and we look at what children already know and plan activities based on their needs. Sometimes this will be activities planned for a small group or resources provided for children to develop their own learning.

We have key worker groups to ensure that children have a link person responsible for their needs and learning.

When parents and early years’ staff work together children make better progress. By sharing information about interests and needs we can try to ensure that children make good progress in their learning.

We have ‘Stay and play sessions’ and ‘Early Start Sessions’ as well as more formal parent consultations but we encourage parents to talk to us regularly.

Francis Askew Primary School has a 39 place full time nursery. Our nursery unit sits alongside our two Foundation 2 classrooms and has a dedicated outdoor area and large and airy indoor space in which we seek to value and nurture the children’s curiosity, creativity and desire to make sense of the world. We also give time for their thoughts and ideas, and value their work, their conversations and their feelings.  We want to give them the best possible start and our highly experienced F1 team know exactly the skills they will need in order to really fly when they get to school.

Children can join our nursery in the term after their 3 birthday and parents/carers should approach the school directly and complete an application form.

If you would like to visit our nursery prior to making an application to join us, please ring the school office on 509627 to make an appointment.

Children in our Reception classes follow the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum and much of the teaching and learning is done through play based and child initiated activities both inside and outdoors. Taking the children’s interests as a starting point, the teachers plan a variety of activities designed to develop and extend children’s learning and understanding. The bright and colourful environment enhances the children’s development, ensuring that they have a positive and exciting learning experience. It also enables the children to access activities suitable for them at their stage of development. We encourage parental involvement and offer many occasions where you can come into school to see how your child is learning and developing.

Our curriculum enables us to tailor the education of each child by identifying and planning for their next steps of development through both the prime and the specific areas of learning:

Foundation 1 curriculum overview

Foundation 2 curriculum overview