Sue focuses on helping Early Years educators understand, own, and build their own curriculum in a developmentally informed way, moving away from prescriptive, top-down approaches. The webinar breaks the curriculum down into five layered components, like an onion:
- Families
- Other people
- Physical environment
- Emotional environment
- The child
Key takeaways
- Capture family and cultural capital:
Gather detailed knowledge about each child's family background, interests, and home culture, and reflect this within the setting's environment and curriculum planning. Dr. Sue Allingham noted that failing to start from the child's own context risks misplacing the "cognitive jigsaw" piece, meaning learning will not truly embed. - Audit the physical environment for messaging:
Review what messages the current physical environment sends to children and families, ensuring it reflects the real children present rather than a preconceived image. Environments should represent the diversity of children's backgrounds, interests, and experiences. - Prioritise the emotional environment: Ensure the emotional environment is actively supported alongside the physical one, as children's ability to regulate feelings directly underpins their capacity to learn. Practical strategies, such as providing a calm space with a comfort object, can be embedded as explicit curriculum elements.
- Draft a concise curriculum vision document: Produce a short document — potentially as few as six key points — that clearly states what children will be able to do or experience upon leaving the setting, framed in open, enabling language rather than closed targets. This document supports both internal team alignment and external inspection readiness.
- Invite children's questions to shape curriculum content: Actively ask children what they want to find out and use their responses to inform teaching, rather than relying solely on predetermined themes or topics. Dr. Sue Allingham highlighted that children's genuine questions, such as how water makes electricity, can drive rich and meaningful curriculum moments.
- Ensure all team members can articulate curriculum intent, implementation, and impact: Build staff confidence so that every practitioner can explain what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it benefits individual children, particularly in the context of inspection. The what, why, and how framework aligns directly with the intent, implementation, and impact structure.
