The Development Matters guidance is supporting schools to implement September’s EYFS reforms. Dr Julian Grenier, who led on the writing of Development Matters, looks at the four priorities that are driving the reforms and responds to our recent coverage of the ‘rival’ Birth to Five Matters guidance

 

The changes to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), which take effect in September, offer a great opportunity to schools to reflect, rethink, and check that our priorities are right. In this article, I am going to outline some of those opportunities, and also tackle some of the misconceptions which were reported in a recent article in this magazine (Henty, 2021).

The changes (DfE, 2021) to the EYFS are focused on four key priorities:

The EYFS Statutory Framework sets out what we are legally required to do. The Department for Education’s non-statutory guidance, Development Matters (DfE, 2020), supports us in putting those changes into action. I was a member of the advisory group which oversaw the changes to the EYFS, and I led on the writing of the new Development Matters.

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