Castleway Nursery

We are proud to be an IQM flagship school.

Our Intent and Implementation

At Castleway Nursery School we believe in working in partnership with parents to enable children to reach their full potential, ensuring their school journey begins in a positive way, creating lifelong learners. We support diversity by planning and guiding what our children learn, reflecting on every child’s unique, individual learning journey and adjust our practice accordingly. Developing a child’s language is the most important job we have as educators. The world belongs to children who can communicate and express their feelings, ideas and needs. For this reason we always offer a language-rich environment to support the children’s development of communication and language.

Our curriculum is ambitious and so we treat development matters as the floor not the sky. We believe that every child is on their own unique path and has their own unique next steps, with this in mind all children have a key person, who we ensure know each child extremely well, to guarantee that all children are offered experiences which they can access and meet their developmental needs whilst challenging them. We aim to provide motivating first-hand experiences whilst encouraging children to build resilience, ambition and a lifelong love of learning and preparing the children for the year 1 curriculum. To ensure that we expose our children to the key knowledge and skills to support their progression through education, we offer a balance of child initiated, adult led and planning in the moment learning opportunities in small groups, whole class and 1:1 situations to cover all seven areas of learning.

We support the notion that teaching is a broad term that covers the many ways in which adults help young children learn. We aim to balance what individual children are interested in including their own experiences and following their interests but also drawing their attention to the things which they need to know, to develop their understanding and skills they need to not only make progress now but also skills that will prepare them for their further education. This supports the children’s development, builds their confidence as they learn to explore independently and solve problems whilst engaging with others. Children’s personal, social and emotional development is crucial for them to lead happy and healthy lives and is fundamental to their cognitive development. Our children are supported to understand their own feelings and show an awareness of the feelings of others whilst being happy and sociable learners, who are willing to try and persevere with new things.

We ensure that all children are given equal opportunities including when attending our vast forest school or using the outdoor learning environment. Children are supported to become curious and excited to learn about their physical world, local community and family’s history. We invite important members of the community such as police officers, dentists and firefighters to talk to the children about their work. Our garden and forest school are visited by a wide range of wildlife, hedgehogs, woodpeckers, foxes, frogs, newts, dragonflies and other insects and the children have the opportunity to grow and observe a range of plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables.

As we know, every cohort is different, the curriculum is always under review, as children change from one cohort to the next and their needs change from one term to the next.

EYFS in our school

Our EYFS consists of Early Foundation (2 year olds) and Foundation Stage One (Nursery Class). Our EYFS offers sessions during term time only.

Foundation Stage One is for children the term after they are three years old, three and four-year-old children.

From April 2024, eligible working parents of 2-year-olds have been able to access 15 hours childcare support.

From September 2024, 15 hours childcare support will be extended to eligible working parents of children from the age of 9 months to 3-year-olds.

Parents can check their eligibility here

Sessions

We offer morning, afternoon and all day sessions.

Working parents are able to apply for 30 hours a week of government - funded early education for three and four year olds. All children aged three and four are entitled to 15 hours of government funded education.

The sessions offered to Nursery School children are as follows:

Full day sessions 8.45am – 3.25pm
Morning sessions 8.45am - 11.45am
Afternoon sessions 12.25pm - 3.25pm.

We have forest school sessions once per week and have access to outdoor learning every session.

Curriculum

Our curriculum is planned and taught through the children’s needs and interests as we believe that children learn best when they are engaged and motivated. The Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum covers these areas of learning:

Personal, Social and Emotional Communication and Language
Physical Development
Literacy
Mathematics
Understanding of the World
Expressive Arts and Design

Our classrooms are organised into smaller areas for the children to access independently throughout the session, as well as our outside area. The Nursery team carefully observe, interact and challenge the children’s learning through their play using quality interactions.

Each child has a key person who they spend time with in a small group each day. This ensures that every child’s care is tailored to meet their individual needs. The key person also helps the child become familiar with the setting and offers a settled relationship for them. The key person will build a relationship with the child's parents and is someone that parents can talk to, to share any concerns or celebrate achievements.

Adults will assess children's learning through observations and use this knowledge to offer children next steps to progress. We use Tapestry to share some of these observations with parents. Tapestry is a "an easy-to-use and secure online learning journal helping staff and families celebrate their children’s learning and development". Parents are a child's first educator and so uploading your own pictures of your child to their learning journals on Tapestry will help us engage with the child's interests outside of nursery. We believe that children's progression and development is key to success.