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Core Experiences for the Early Years Foundation StageEdit

Introduction and welcome

Core Experiences for the Early Years Foundation Stage is a planning framework for early childhood education and care in England. The basic idea is that young children should be able to access a wide range of high-quality experiences every day (or at least very regularly) in nursery. The framework is written to show how these experiences cover all areas of learning and how children might develop and learn as they revisit each experience over time. It also gives guidance to adults in the nursery on how they can support children's development and learning and teach them new skills and concepts. With the "Core Experiences" in place, the practitioners can then start to think about and plan for children individually.

This work has been developed by Kate Greenaway Nursery School and Children's Centre in London, England, building on an earlier idea from Southway Nursery School and Children's Centre in Bedfordshire.

Share and collaborate Edit

In the past most schools and nurseries have kept their work and documents private, meaning that there has been a failure to learn from each other. In case you are unfamiliar with the wiki format, the main thing to know is that anyone can edit, make suggestions, post queries or rate this planning framework. We can share our knowledge and experience and collaborate together. All we ask is that you share alike - let others use your work, and do not use any of our work for commercial gain.

If you work with children in an early years setting, or are interested in early years education and care, we hope you will find this site interesting and useful, and we hope you will contribute your own ideas, and debate some of the important issues and ideas here. As the site develops we will be adding more graphics and pictures - at the moment it is pretty much all text, but keep watching. Soon we will add links to each section so you can download anything you want as a Word document and rewrite it for your own purposes.

As this is a first attempt at wiki creation, please smile on errors and help us to correct them. Thanks.

Feedback and support Edit

We've been really thrilled about the number of people who have given us feedback. If you've got views - positive or negative - let us know, and let the debate flow. Please email us with your views.

Here's a selection we've had so far:

Professor Iram Siraj-Blatchford This document is a brilliant example of a group of professionals applying evidence based principles to extending children's learning. The child is at the heart of this document. However, unlike many other documents this work also keenly and willingly shows the power and need for the profession's crucial role in empowering children to extend their play, interests and thinking by building on the children's motivations. Any early childhood educator would benefit from reflecting on the content here, to see how the puzzle of the whole child, adult, interaction, content, assessment and extending thought fit together in healthy, loving and learning relationships between children and adults in one inspiring setting.

Sir Jim Rose [This] excellent booklet ... provides a really good insight into the reality of providing a broad and rich nursery education. ... with the high value strands of learning through:social interaction:heuristic and other forms of play; language development; physical (multi-sensory), emotional health and so forth

Penny Kenway We are delighted with the new document from Kate Greenaway Nursery School and Children's Centre on children's "Core Experiences" in early years settings and believe this will support many practitioners, in Islington and beyond, to understand how fundamental nursery experiences can support children's learning and development within the EYFS phase. For many years, Islington council has been committed to developing early years pedagogy and giving a range of staff develoment opportunities to early years practitioners. The bringing-together of all early years provision in the borough, under Education alongside nursery schools over a decade ago , began the process of ensuring children and their families receive high quality care and education, no matter which early years provision is attend. The Kate Greenaway NSCC document demonstrates how crucial it is to provide staff with opportunities to reflect on everyday practice in ways that allow them to develop their understanding of early years pedagogy and improve the quality of their practice. What's more, this document's accessibility to all fulfills the key role that nursery schools and children's centres can and must play in disseminating the good practice they have developed.