Our curriculum approaches the Early Years Foundation Stage through the perspective of 4E cognition: learning is embodied, embedded, enacted and extended through relationships with other people and the environment.

Rather than seeing development as a series of separate skills that adults transmit to children, we understand learning as something children actively make sense of through their bodies, actions, surroundings, and interactions with others.

Each of the seven areas of the EYFS has a curriculum goal: something we would like children to be increasingly able to understand, experience and do by the time they leave us and move on to school.

These seven goals are distinct, but development does not travel towards them along seven separate paths. The areas continually overlap, interact and support one another.

We imagine this curriculum as a toy maze containing seven balls and seven goal spaces, representing the seven areas of learning. Our role is not to pick up a ball and place it directly into its goal, but to participate in the movement of the whole maze. The paths overlap: movement in Communication and Language may enable movement in Personal, Social and Emotional Development; growing physical confidence may open possibilities in Mathematics or Understanding the World.

Sometimes a ball encounters a blockage, and we need to gently change the conditions around it; sometimes we need to wait until other balls are in position before it can move again. Practitioners therefore participate in children’s learning with warmth, attentiveness and gentle guidance, responding to the movement of the whole system rather than forcing progress in one system.

Tilt the maze too quickly, and the system can become unstable; move it too slowly, and the balls may not move at all. Skilled practice lies in sensing when to guide, when to adjust the environment, when to join in, and when to wait, allowing each child’s learning to find its way towards the curriculum goals through participation, exploration and participatory sense-making.