British Values and the EYFS

Hello, and welcome to open a nursery with me, Curtly Ania.

In today’s video, we are going over the fundamental principles of the British values.

If you are new here, this channel was set up to help people like yourself to not only open a nursery, but to run and grow any type of childcare business.

But as I said in today’s video, we’re going over the fundamental principles of the British values, of which there are either four or five, depending on how you word it.

But here I’m going to separate them into five.

This is all part of the EYFS, which is the framework for early education in the UK.

The aim of the EYFS is to provide high quality education and care for children.  So, where does the British values fall into this?

In recent years, the concept of British values has become increasingly prominent within the EYFS, with a growing emphasis of promoting these values within earlier settings.

So, what are the fundamental principles of the British values?

Well, the first one is democracy.

At its core, democracy is based on an idea that everyone should have a say on how the country is run and that everyone’s opinions should be valued and respected in earlier settings. This means that children should be encouraged to share their thoughts and feelings on a variety of different topics and that everyone’s opinions should be given equal value.

In order to do this in your setting, you should be trying to create opportunities for children to engage in decision making process.

This can be as simple as asking children to vote on what activities they might want to door what they might want to learn about.

Rather than telling them, we’re going to do this activity today, you can give them the option to choose between one or two or three different activities and they can choose whether they want to do it together or individually.

An important part to add is that you should be encouraging children to listen to other people’s opinions too and allow them to start considering different points of views.

So, one child might have one opinion, but we then encourage other children to respect that one child’s opinion. Encouraging our setting will teach them how democracy works in a wider society.

You could go deeper into this and show them how we as society, deal with democracy.

So, for example, explaining the electoral system and explaining how government officials are elected and how we get representatives, this is all preparing children for their role of being a citizen later on in life.

The second fundamental principle of British values is rule of law. This is the principle that everyone is equal under the law and that all laws or rules should be applied fairly and justly.

This means that everyone should be held accountable of their actions, regardless of their backgrounds or social status.

In order to promote rule of law, you simply need to provide opportunities for children to learn about the importance of rules.  This starts by setting clear boundaries for your children and clear expectations for how they should behave at your setting.

You can further develop this by helping children to understand the consequences of breaking rules and to appreciate the importance of taking responsibility for your own actions.

You can extend this even further by getting children to come up with their own rules for their nursery or their setting and talk about why the rule they’ve made up is important.

So, they might say there shouldn’t be no running in the class. And you can help them to explain the reason why we don’t run in class is because of potential dangers and hazards.

Again, you can extend this by teaching about the rule of law in real life.

So, by explaining the criminal justice system or aspects of the law like that.

This is all just preparing our children to be model citizens once they leave your setting.

Simply by creating clear rules and boundaries. It helps to create a safe and stimulating environment where children can develop a strong sense of responsibility and respect for the law, but moving on to the next principle, which is individual liberty.

This refers to the idea that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices and decisions as long as they don’t harm others in the process.

This is a key part of the personal, social and emotional development which forms part of the seven areas of learning.

Again, this is all about allowing children to make choices, so you can allow them to choose their own activities and choose what things they might want to do. This gives children a sense of agency and self-determination, which is essential for building confidence and self-esteem.

You are showing them that you trust them to make their own decisions, which then gives them the confidence to go and do that in other areas.

Though at this age they would need a lot of guidance and support around this area as they may not fully understand the consequence of certain decisions, as they will need to be told and informed about what decisions may cause certain actions.

To extend this into a wider society, you can teach children about certain rights and freedoms that we have.

The fourth key principle of the British values is mutual respect.

This is the idea that everyone should treat others with respect regardless of their background.

This is key to teaching children about positive relationships.

Promoting mutual respect in early years is about creating a welcoming and nurturing environment whereby everyone is treated with respect and dignity.

This can be done by valuing diversity and celebrating our differences.

We should be creating opportunities for children to learn about different cultures, different backgrounds and different beliefs, even if your setting is full of children of the same background.

A key part of this is how we interact with our peers. So, if they see you as practitioners, being good role models with each other.

They will then learn from this too.

The fifth key principle of the British values, which is sometimes linked in with mutual respect, is about tolerating those with different beliefs and faiths.

So again, you’ll be doing similar things that you’ve done with mutual respect.  Celebrating different cultures, celebrating different beliefs and celebrating different backgrounds, have different books in your settings around different cultures so that children can learn from and pick up on.

Again, even if you don’t have that belief or background in your setting, it’s good for children to learn about it, so that when they go out into wider world, they have a better understanding of that group of people.

Again, a key part of tolerating others is how we show that we tolerate others.

Children will be looking to us as role models, so no matter how much we tell them, they should be respectful to each other. If we aren’t respectable to our parents, to our staff members and to the children, they will pick up on this rather than what we tell them.

So those are the five key principles of the British values.  But to conclude, how does this link to the EYFS?

In the EYFS, it is seen as a key part of promoting children’s personal, social and emotional development. By promoting these values, earliest practitioners can help children develop a sense of belonging and identity within the British society.

Some ways that the British values are promoted in Eyfs include creating a safe and stimulating environment that promotes mutual respect and tolerance encouraging children to share thoughts and opinions and listen to and respect other people’s points of views providing opportunities for children to learn about rule of law and to understand the importance of rules.

The British values help to encourage children to collaborate with others. And finally, celebrating and promoting diversity provides the opportunity for children to learn and appreciate other people’s beliefs and cultures.

So I hope this has given you some ideas of how you promote British values in your setting. I know when this first came out, a lot of settings simply put our British flags with these headings on them.

But it’s important to realize that this is not what British values is about. It is about what we discussed in this video, ensuring that everyone feels included within British values and creating model citizens.

So hopefully you have a better understanding of it. Now if you have, let me know by hitting that like button. Thank you for listening to me. Before you go, don’t forget to subscribe. And if you plan to open your own nursery or want support in one of your nursery, check out the website www.opennursery.Co.UK.

And don’t forget about the two books that you see here how to Open a Nursery in the UK, which goes through the things that you need to do in order to open your own nursery.

And this essential childcare marketing book which covers all type of Childcare Businesses.

It provides 99 proven ways that you can market your childcare business. Both of these books are available on Amazon and I’ll put the link in the description.

These are just two of the many ways that I try to support you to run, grow and open your childcare business and as always, I wish you all the best and I’ll see you on the next video. God Bless.