Curriculum intent

We aim to ensure that children are: 

• Happy, secure and feel safe
• Independent, self-assured risk takers
• Confident and Resilient
• Excited and Motivated to learn
• Socially strong and able to form positive relationships

We believe that every child deserves the best possible start in life, in order for them to fulfil their potential. All staff deeply care about the children in our nursery. We treat all children as individuals and promote positive relationships and secure bonds. We make it a priority to form close relationships with families and the wider community to promote the best outcomes for all children. Staff members use consistent boundaries and praise, and rewards form the backbone of our behaviour management system.

We recognise and value an individual’s strengths and talents and we believe in praising effort and valuing the little steps that make a difference to a child’s progress. We know that by doing this, we are building happy and secure children, who feel safe. Praise and clear boundaries contribute to the confidence and resilience of our children. Creating independent children, not only in their organisational skills but also in their learning, is a high priority for us. We believe that all children are intrinsically capable of amazing things and we develop this by having high expectations of all children.

We pose challenges, build confidence and self-esteem, show children how capable they are and support them to reach their potential. We take time to teach independence skills explicitly and support children to develop into well-rounded, ambitious learners. Taking risks is an important part of learning, and we have developed both our environments and our teaching and learning strategies to promote children measuring and assessing risks for themselves, and having confidence and resilience to attempt challenges. Confidence and resilience are key skills for a developing learner. We explicitly teach children to understand the learning process and understanding that mistakes are valuable learning experiences. Through the Characteristics of Effective Learning, we develop children’s active learning skills and help them to understand and respond to feedback.

Perseverance is highly valued and praised. We strongly believe that to develop resilience, we must teach children to be independent learners who problem-solve for themselves and know to keep trying, and how and when to access help. Excitement and motivation for learning are developed through planning fun, engaging and challenging lessons based on the needs of the children. We provide new and interesting experiences, building on and adding to the range of activities children will have had at home or through pre-school experience. We make learning purposeful and rooted in real-life contexts, where possible so that children have motivating reasons to learn and to help them to apply their knowledge to a range of situations.