About Us

What We Do

“....for in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be........”

John Connolly. The Book of Lost Things(2006)

How We Do It

At Gateway Nursery, as an Ofsted registered setting, we follow the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework (EYFS).

We are a registered ‘Good’ Provider and you can find our most recent Ofsted Report Here

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) was originally launched in 2008. It is the statutory framework for all early years providers in England. The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage sets the standards that all early years providers must meet. Early years providers in England who provide care and learning for children from birth to the end of reception class must comply with the EYFS Statutory Framework. Ofsted regulate and inspect all early years providers against the safeguarding and welfare requirements and areas of learning to determine how well children are kept safe and healthy. From time to time the EYFS is updated and refreshed, so far this has happened in 2012, 2014 and 2017.

The EYFS enables our practitioners to provide a quality education with a curriculum that staff can use to facilitate learning, deliver high quality learning experiences and enable us to plan environments that provide activities and opportunities, to ensure that every child’s learning and development is as interactive and fun as possible, and is based upon that child’s interests. Learning opportunities are provided from well-planned activities that are always delivered through child-led or adult-led sessions and are planned focusing on the Intent (what does the child need?), the Implementation (how are we going to enable the learning to take place?) and the Impact (what did the child learn?)

What is the EYFS?

What's Changing?

From September 2021 a revised EYFS will come into force. The key messages about the reforms include:

Reducing practitioner/teacher workload and needless paperwork to allow for more quality time and interactions with the children
Improving the outcomes of all children and addressing/reducing the disadvantage gaps
The importance of workforce knowledge and professional development to inform assessments. Reflect upon the need to assess every child’s development against ‘check lists’, saving formal steps of assessment for when they are necessary

What do the changes mean to me as a parent/carer?

The safety of your child and the quality of the education provided will not change. You may not see any changes in terms of the activities and opportunities on offer at Gateway to your child/ren. However, you may notice that we are not physically recording as many observations and assessments of progress. Please be reassured that we will still be supporting your child’s development and responding to their interests. We will be using our professional judgements to assess your child’s development during our daily interactions and activities. The progress check at 2 years is still a mandatory assessment point and we will still share your child’s development and progress with you.

We will still share observations with you on our Famly system however please understand that the number of shared observations may be less than now since the new EYFS aims to increase the time that our practitioners spend with children in enhancing their play rather than observing and documenting.

Since every child that attends nursery has a different number and different range of interests, experiences, opportunities and ideas based on their own personal circumstances outside of nursery, (referred to as ‘cultural capital’,) children may start the EYFS at any point with a range of gaps in their skills and knowledge. It is our responsibility to identify gaps and consider what learning opportunities and experiences our curriculum needs to include in order to fill those gaps and support each child in achieving their potential. We will always work in conjunction with parents, guardians, carers, and will include outside agencies where required and will hopefully be well on the way to completing our part of your child’s learning jigsaw as they leave us for ‘big school’.

Our curriculum

The 7 areas of learning and development within the EYFS have not changed, these are:

• Communication and language

• Physical development

• Personal, social and emotional development

• Literacy

• Mathematics

• Understanding the world

• Expressive arts and design

The prime areas of learning form the essential foundations for healthy development and future learning. Once a solid start has formed within the prime areas we continue to build upon these skills, progressing to explore more learning opportunities within the specific areas of learning.

These 7 areas are the basis for our curriculum. Careful thought is given to inform our enabling environments (indoors and outdoors), to provide resources, activities and learning opportunities to meet each child’s unique requirements. Ofsted call this ‘curriculum’. Our curriculum is very flexible and responsive to follow children’s interests and those totally unplanned learning opportunities that sometimes come out of the blue, such as it unexpectedly snowing, etc!

Young children learn through play. The EYFS identifies how children learn through the Characteristics of Effective Learning (COELs). COELs identify a child’s behaviour and attitudes towards learning.

These are:

• Playing and exploring

• Active learning

• Creating and thinking critically

Every EYFS provider has their own bespoke curriculum, to support each child’s unique developmental pathway, following their interests and fascinations. It is magical to see the cogs turning when linking to the interests and passions of children or to new, unfamiliar and challenging activities that initiates a spark that enables them to develop a better understanding of something that they are already familiar with or, even better, supports them in learning something new.