Curriculum – A Bright Beginning for every child
By Caroline Wright, Bright Horizons
Our Bright Beginnings curriculum at Bright Horizons was conceived pending the 2021 changes to the EYFS curriculum and early learning goals. As early childhood practitioners and researchers, we reflected on our experience of young children’s learning needs, parents’ aspirations for their children, and how we could best contribute to this open-ended notion of ‘school readiness’, whilst remaining compliant with conditions of registration under EYFS.
Bright Beginnings was conceived at the start of 2020 through practitioner collaboration and deep reflection. A recurring concern amongst our Early Childhood specialist team was that nursery practitioners were not clear about the interconnectedness of children’s learning, despite a rhetorical use of the word ‘holistic’ in their day-to-day conversations. Promoting positive emotional and physical wellbeing is at the core our Bright Beginnings curriculum and is an essential condition of successful learning. We believed that starting afresh, with new areas of learning, would help practitioners to extend their provision and understand that children don’t learn in boxes. Bright Beginnings supports and transcends the seven ‘subject’ areas of learning in the EYFS by focusing on ‘skills and opportunities’ for children to experience.
As the second largest provider of daycare in the UK, understanding the impact in a curriculum change was crucial to us. We have an enormous responsibility to our children, staff and families to be on the right path. Putting our curriculum into practice was essential to assess the impact. We examined children’s self-regulation, involvement and wellbeing. We carried out surveys to assess practitioner understanding of ‘holistic’ learning and monitored environments for evidence of an increase to cross-curricular learning experiences for children. The initial findings are optimistic and indicate that our curriculum has had a positive impact on teaching and learning in our pilot nurseries.
The second phase of our research is due to commence in January 2022, where we will look at the impact of a specific programme of Emotional Wellbeing, embedded in the Bright Beginnings Curriculum, on teachers’ knowledge and practice in supporting children’s personal, social and emotional development in our nurseries.
More information on Bright Beginnings and its impact can be found in our executive summary, which can be downloaded here: https://www.brighthorizons.co.uk/landing-pages/bright-beginnings-research-executive-summary-report
The full 40-page research paper is available on request. Please contact caroline.wright@brighthorizons.com