Early Years Provision at Forest Prep through the eyes of Mrs Budd, Deputy Headteacher.

From the age of two, children are welcomed into our family-orientated setting, where they are encouraged to explore their surroundings and immerse themselves into the Forest way of life. Our age-appropriate Nursery setting, run by our experienced Early Years practitioners, motivates children to actively learn through playing, exploring and creating and thinking critically. With combined experience of over 80 years in Early Years education, our Nursery practitioners have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in helping children to develop their Early Learning Goals. The setting has a mixture of adult and child-led activities and we value the children’s individual interests and incorporate these into their learning journey.

Our Nursery children form an integral part of our school and this is evidenced in the strong bonds they form with our staff, their Nursery peers and our older Foresters. The older pupils, who often come to play with the children at break times, have been known to bring our school pets with them, which usually proves a highlight of the day. At Forest, we have chickens, tortoises and a school dog, Maggie. Children regularly partake in whole school events including weekly Celebration Assemblies, where chosen individuals are presented with a sports, French and Pupil of the Week accolade.

As the Early Years form such a fundamental part of a child’s learning experience and set the tone for their learning behaviours, we ensure our youngest children receive the very best in education. Each week, the children have specialist French, Music and PE lessons timetabled into their day, allowing them the opportunity to experience a broad curriculum which goes above and beyond to develop their skills. Our whole school phonics scheme begins with our foundations programme in Nursery, where the children sing songs and complete a variety of engaging activities to develop their listening and attention skills. Their learning is then continued through to Kindergarten and Reception, forming a comprehensive phonics learning experience. Each term, Nursery children experience an external class trip. In addition to understanding the world around them, we feel trips are important in empowering the children to feel more independent.

We value the close link between home and school and understand that starting Nursery can be a new experience for some children and parents. We therefore offer daily (closed group) Instagram updates, to give parents an insight into what the children have been doing that day and we use Tapestry to communicate our assessment with parents for how their child is developing throughout the year. In the lead up to your child starting, we offer numerous transition sessions, to allow children’s confidence within our setting to build and relationships with our practitioners to flourish. This can be catered to the individual child’s needs.

With the modern demands of parenting life, we have recently opened our doors for non-term time provision, where the children’s learning journey can continue. Only being closed for four weeks of the year (one around Christmas, one at Easter and two towards the end of August), we pride ourselves on accommodating families with a variety of requirements. Our term time wraparound times are Monday - Friday 7:30 am-5:55pm. Our non-term time hours are Monday - Friday 7:30am-5pm. We have had extremely positive feedback surrounding the wraparound we offer; both physically and academically.

Written by Mrs Budd

Deputy Headteacher (Academic and Early Years)