“Our primary aim is to listen, watch, participate, and get down with the children and PLAY”
Our Values
We will start with our values as outlined below; these values underpin the curriculum. These values have been developed through observations, reflections, and conversations with staff, children, and parents from the September 2023 cohort, paired with the September 2024 cohort.
Rationale
‘Every child deserves the best possible start in life and support to reach their full 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’ (Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, Department for Education, 2021).
Values
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- Secure, respectful, and reciprocal relationships
- Partnerships with parents or carers and other professionals
- Respect for diversity
- Ongoing learning and reflective practice
- Providing the best start for every child
- Respect for the world we live in
Pedagogy That Informs the Bubbles Curriculum
Wellbeing
At the outset, children need to feel secure in an environment that provides comfort. Our Key Person system and strong ethos of supporting positive relationships provide a foundation for learning. We ensure children are well-hydrated, have nutritious food, and their physiological and safety needs are met to enable them to flourish.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lays the foundation for all human development. Many of these needs are learned over time, requiring self-regulation. Educators play a crucial role in co-regulating children’s emotions, teaching self-awareness, communication, and conflict resolution. We model self-regulation and work in partnership with parents to support children’s well-being.
100% child-driven practice
This year, September 2025, we have shifted our focus entirely from a partial child/outcome driven pedagogy, to a 100% child-driven pedagogy.
Children are enabled to realise and express their own ideas, through being empowered by our skilled educators to explore and discover through a curriculum that is self-created.
Children want us to hear their joy, their representations of the world, their understanding, their delight and inquisitiveness. During this time in Early Years, the only time where education has the freedom to enable children to be children – to follow their line of enquiry, and express their ability to, and opportunity to BE.
Curriculum Implementation Overview
In order to enable children to flourish, spark new ideas, instinctive led play and exploration, our role is to provide the right environment to do so.
We’ve decided to stop adult-led, neat/bright posters and displays. We’ve asked ourselves, what is it that children need around them to truly learn, feel safe, and feel like the space is truly their own. Our objective is to make resources more accessible, and to ensure that the space to explore chosen resources are open ended. Why set up a role play space as prescribed by an adult, when we can instead, make the resources available for the children to create whatever they feel they want to, at the moment in time. When thinking back to our own childhood, it was he building the Lego that was the fun part, not just playing with the masterpiece that we created.
Curriculum Impact
We assess curriculum effectiveness through:
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- Observations tracking children’s outcomes.
- Parent partnerships supporting progress at home.
- Additional assessments such as speech and language tools
We use the EYFS – Prime and Specific Areas of Learning
| Prime Areas | Specific Areas |
| Communication and Language | Literacy |
| Physical Development | Mathematics |
| Personal, Social, and Emotional Development | Understanding the World, Expressive Arts and Design |
Baseline assessments upon entry and ongoing educator supervision ensure progress monitoring. We focus on the Prime Areas of learning during our initial assessments. We complete and share end-of-year assessments, which help us to evaluate learning outcomes before transitioning to Reception.
The time in-between these two periods is very much a case of our team plotting progress, and creating child-centred ‘next steps. We recognise that learning and attainment is not a linear process, so the EYFS is used as a tool only, to assist us with supporting children to make progress, at a pace that is directed by them.
This curriculum ensures an engaging, adaptable, and child-centred learning experience at Bubbles Pre-school.
In July 2025, due to the growing success of our preschool, we invested £12,000 in new resources, and equipment, to support our new approaches.
