Early childhood is the foundation on which children build the rest of their lives. At High Littleton Primary School, we greatly value the important role that the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) plays in laying secure foundations for future learning and development.  

We aim to:

• provide a safe, challenging, stimulating, caring and sharing environment which is sensitive to the needs of the child, including children with additional needs

• provide a broad, balanced, relevant and creative curriculum that will enable each child to develop personally, socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically, creatively and intellectually to his/her full potential.

• provide opportunities for children to learn through planned, purposeful play in all areas of learning and development

• use and value what each child can do, assessing their individual needs and helping each child to progress

• enable choice and decision-making, fostering independence and self-confidence

• work in partnership with Parents/carers and value their contributions

• ensure that all children, irrespective of ethnicity, culture, religion, home language, family background, learning difficulties, disabilities, gender or ability, have the opportunity to experience a challenging and enjoyable programme of learning and development

We use the Unlocking Letters and Sounds phonics programme. We begin teaching phonics in the first few weeks of term 1 in Reception and children make rapid progress in their reading journey. Children begin to learn the main sounds heard in the English Language and how they can be represented, as well as learning ‘Common Exception’ words for Phases 2, 3 and 4. They use these sounds to read and write simple words, captions and sentences. Children leave Reception being able to apply the phonemes taught within Phase 2, 3 and 4.

In Year 1 through Phase 5a, b and c, they learn any alternative spellings and pronunciations for the graphemes and additional Common Exception Words. By the end of Year 1 children will have mastered using phonics to decode and blend when reading and segment when spelling. In Year 1 all children are screened using the national Phonics Screening Check.

In Year 2, phonics continues to be revisited to ensure mastery of the phonetic code and any child who does not meet age related expectations will continue to receive support to close identified gaps.

For further details please see our Unlocking Letters and Sounds progression document below.
To ensure no child is left behind at any point in the progression, children are regularly assessed and supported to keep up through bespoke 1-1 interventions. These include GPC recognition and blending and segmenting interventions. The lowest attaining 20% of pupils are closely monitored to ensure these interventions have an impact.

The reading books children take home are very closely matched to a child's current phonics knowledge so that every child can experience real success in their reading and decode at least 95% of the text. We use books from a range of reading schemes which have been carefully matched to ensure complete fidelity to the Unlocking Letters and Sounds progression.