Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in Nursery and Reception

Every child deserves the best possible start in life and the support that enables them to fulfil their potential. Children develop quickly in the early years and a child’s experiences between birth and age five have a major impact on their future life chances. A secure, safe and happy childhood is important in its own right. Good parenting and high quality early learning together provide the foundation children need to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up.

 

How your child will be learning

In Nursery and Reception Class your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development.

 

Children should mostly develop the 3 prime areas first. These are:

• Communication and Language (C&L);
• Physical Development (PD); and
• Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED).

These prime areas are those most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning.  As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in 4 specific areas. These are:

• Literacy (L);
• Mathematics (M);
• Understanding the World (UW); and
• Expressive Arts and Design (EAD). These 7 areas are used to plan your child’s learning and activities. Teaching staff and professionals supporting your child will make sure that the activities are suited to your child’s unique needs and interests. Children in the EYFS learn by playing and exploring, being active, and through creative and critical thinking which takes place both indoors and outside. At the end of the EYFS – in the summer term of the Reception year in school – teachers complete an assessment which is known as the EYFS Profile. This assessment is based on observations and assessments of your child by all staff working with them throughout the year.

 

The ShREC approach

1 July 2025

The EEF’s early years specialist Fliss James explains how educators can use the ‘ShREC’ approach to engage young children in high-quality interactions.

Fliss James

Content Specialist for Early Years

Supporting children to become better communicators is one of the most powerful things we do as early years educators. Oral language skills are fundamental to children’s learning, thinking and emotional wellbeing. Children who can communicate well can make friends, play, resolve conflicts and tell us how they are feeling. In the short term, children who are better communicators at age five become better readers. In the longer term, they go on to achieve better exam results at age 16 and are more likely to gain higher-paid employment as adults (Shuey and Kankaraš, 2018).

Prioritising communication and language development

Research tells us that we should prioritise the development of children’s communication and language through socially meaningful interactions. Children thrive on conversation with people they have a strong relationship with, focused on things they want to talk about.

High quality interactions often look effortless, but they are not easy to do well. The ShREC approach provides us with a simple and memorable set of specific, evidence-informed strategies which we can embed into everyday practice. We can use these strategies with every child, every day.

So, what happens during the ShREC approach?

Share attention

Tuning in’ and showing genuine interest in what a young child is focused on lets them know that you value and want to spend time with them. It is a powerful way to establish a connection.

Getting down to the child’s level and engaging in their choice of activity provides a crucial opportunity to pay attention to what they look at, what they do, and what they say. Sensitively joining in with a child’s play motivates them to communicate with you.

Respond

How we respond to a child once we have established joint engagement is dependent on our knowledge of them as a unique individual. Adaptive, attuned responses should be sensitive, supportive and stimulating. Educators should warmly acknowledge children’s verbal and non-verbal communication. Non-verbal responses may include eye contact, looking expectantly, nodding or smiling. Verbal responses may include narrating what the child is doing or commenting on what they can see, hear, feel. You may articulate the link between their activity and previous learning or experiences.

Expand

The ‘back and forth’ rally of engagement is getting underway: the educator and child are sharing attention, with the educator responsively following the child’s lead. This is where modelling and scaffolding begins, with the educator pitching their language just above the level of the child.

If a child gives a one-word response such as ‘dog’, we should expand on what they say. Educators can do this by repeating and building on this utterance by adding a few more words (‘Yes, it’s a dog. A small, brown dog’). This helps children to use more complex utterances. Your knowledge of the child will inform what may be helpful to model.

Conversation

The goal is to develop sustained back-and-forth conversations that involve many turns. The beauty and power of conversation is that it offers children an opportunity to practise talking and to receive feedback from an adult.

To encourage rich back-and-forth conversations: comment more, question less. When used sparingly, questions can be useful to cue turn-taking during conversation, especially ‘Wh’ (who, what, where, when) and open questions which invite children to elaborate.

As children’s conversational skills develop, we can sensitively challenge children, shaping the conversation to incorporate more abstract topics that are removed from the ‘here and now’.

These strategies encourage us to become more responsive and attuned to children. They encourage children’s active participation in meaningful, stimulating and linguistically rich back-and-forth conversations.

Click on the two links below to visit our Early Year’s pages