Situated within our primary school site, Haylands Pre-School is part of Haylands Primary School. Haylands Pre-School has a highly experienced staff team, who are committed to providing high quality care and learning opportunities in a safe, warm, caring and enabling environment for children aged 2-4 to develop and thrive [1.19]. At Haylands Pre-School, we want to encourage every child to be an active explorer, who is curious, experimental, co-operative and confident. We follow a play-based learning approach, offering a balance of child initiated and adult led activities ensuring we have the children’s interest and needs at the centre of our focus whilst providing extra activities to widen their experiences and understanding of the world around us. Every child learns differently, so we offer flexible planning by tailoring each activity to their individual needs, interests and development to help them reach their full potential!

The three characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:

Playing and exploring, Active learning and Creating and thinking critically. [1.12, 1.18]

Early years providers must guide the development of children’s capabilities to help ensure that children in their care will fully benefit from future opportunities’ [1.1]

We have two indoor open spaces, which covers the learning of the seven areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage, our environment inspires children to use their initiative and imagination, enabling them to collaborate and solve problems with their peers [1.2, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6]. We have an outdoor open space, which allows the children to have freedom to move and be active whilst experiencing opportunities to grow in confidence by taking risks to achieve.

As we are part of Haylands Primary School, we’re welcomed to use their facilities, such as the forest which we use as part of our forest schooling which enables us to explore our natural environment, the field which is a lovely big green space for us to move freely, the school hall which is where we eat our lunch and have a hot school dinner on a Friday and the library which we use to go and choose books weekly. We have a close relationship with our Reception classes and join them in their environment weekly as well as joining them for regular stories and themed event days. This enables our children to get to know the staff and environment really well so they can transition to primary school smoothly.