Our ambitious early years curriculum is designed to give pupils, particularly the most disadvantaged, the knowledge, self-belief and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. Coherently planned and sequenced, it builds on what pupils know and can do, towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for their future learning. Our curriculum connections maps identify how the areas of learning are developed across the year and linked to a half-termly topic. Purposeful planning builds on prior skills learnt and becomes more challenging as the year progresses.

Our approach to teaching is enhanced by walk-thru strategies to help pupils remember more over time. This involves daily, low-stakes retrieval practice, such as quick-fire games, using finger rhymes to practice counting, or repeating new vocabulary as a whole class with actions. These methods are embedded in our daily routines and are deliberately spaced out over time to strengthen neural connections through spaced repetition, ensuring foundational knowledge is retained. These moments are also key opportunities for high-quality interactions, where staff can scaffold and support children's recall.

Our provision across both prime and specific areas of learning is carefully planned to enable all pupils to develop their personalities, talents and abilities. Continuous provision is not passive; it is a dynamic learning environment where resources are intentionally selected and arranged to provide opportunities to practise and embed key skills. This is supported by our commitment to high-quality interactions, where staff act as active facilitators of learning. Through effective questioning, scaffolding, and targeted conversation, we extend vocabulary and deepen children's understanding, ensuring every interaction is a teaching opportunity.

Our approach to teaching early reading and synthetic phonics is systematic and ensures that all pupils learn to read words and simple sentences accurately by the end of reception. We use Read Write Inc reading books that are carefully matched to the sounds children have been taught, in order to build confidence and success. Our phonic assessment data measures the impact of phonics teaching half termly and informs additional support and intervention to enable any pupil experiencing difficulties to catch up. There is a strong culture of developing a love of reading, supported by class book areas and daily opportunities to enjoy high-quality stories and poems selected as part of our Reading Spine.

Talk for Writing strategies underpin the teaching of writing. Through oral rehearsal, actions and text mapping pupils begin to make sense of a range of storytelling language and sentence construction in preparation for writing. Vocabulary development is a key focus and our intent is for pupils to build their knowledge and understanding of word meanings in order to make effective and ambitious choices when they tell and write stories. Stimulating and engaging texts introduce pupils to a broad range of narrative themes that they first imitate and then innovate, creating stories for themselves. Storytelling and language development are also enhanced through role play and opportunities for performance.

A sharp focus on early mathematics ensures that pupils gain confidence, speed and proficiency when working with numbers. Direct teaching of concepts and skills is given real-life context and purpose, often linked to the half-termly topics, and supported by a range of everyday resources as well as manipulatives such as Numicon. Opportunities to embed mathematical concepts are provided through planned practice both in the classroom and the outdoor learning environment. Flashbacks or retrieval practice enable pupils to remember more over time.

Children have the opportunity to play and explore, be active learners and think critically. Our curriculum drivers of growth mindset, community, environment and language development are embedded in teaching and learning and develop the child as a whole. We believe that every child is unique who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured.