Our aims, values, ethos, British values

At Little Stars we feel one of the most important things for a child is to feel nurtured. We establish a strong key person approach within our early years setting and secure bonds between our staff and children in our wrap around care sessions. Our staff have a strong commitment to care for and protect our children whilst they grow. Our staff encourage our children by giving support and building their confidence and resilience, whilst promoting social and emotional development. By stimulating our children’s development, we inspire and motivate them to achieve their full potential.

We also have a high regard to promoting a healthy balanced lifestyle. We like to promote physical and active play, healthy meals and eating and supporting everybody’s mental health and wellbeing.

At Little Stars we have 11 values to support our children when learning about themselves and others. Our values support our everyday practice, and they are referred to across all our settings. Each month we focus on a particular value and teach the children the meaning behind the value. This enables all children, staff and their families to have a clear understanding of Little Stars’ values.

• Friendship - September
• Respect/Equality - October
• Kindness - November
• Honesty - December
• Responsibility - January
• Challenge - February
• Helpfulness - March
• Courage - April
• Community - May
• Happiness - June
• Success & Reflection – July

Since 2014, there has been a huge emphasis on the importance of promoting British Values within Early years settings and childcare settings. At Little Stars we actively ensure we encourage and refer to British values in our everyday practice. It is a huge part of our settings ethos and values.  

The concept of British values can sometimes be misinterpreted. It isn’t a focus on what ‘Britain values’. It is more about tolerance, love and care for others, respect, sharing and allowing everyone to be an individual regardless of their views and beliefs. We aim at Little Stars to be fully inclusive and to always promote and encourage diversity within our settings.

Examples of how we promote British Values are, celebrating religious and cultural festivals throughout the year such as Holi, Eid, St. Patricks day, Diwali, Christmas, Easter and Chines New Year. We also venture out into our local community to teach the children about other ways of life. We also refer to our own setting values to promote our children to be tolerant of others views and be kind to everyone within the setting and to follow this ethos whilst they are away from the setting.

We celebrate British Values in our everyday practice and ensure we embrace the diverse culture we are so lucky to be part of.

What are the 4 British values?

• Democracy: making decisions together
• Rule of law: understanding that rules matter
• Individual liberty: freedom for all
• Mutual respect and tolerance: treat others how you wish to be treated

We promote an understanding of democracy within our setting by giving all our children, staff and families to have many opportunities for their voices to be heard. It is also very important that we ensure that anyone that attends Little Stars feels like their opinions are important and that their thoughts and feelings should be listened to and valued. We aim to achieve this by teaching our children and informing our parents, carers and staff that we have the power to choose and make decisions as individuals and as part of a group. We feel this is an important skill for all our children to have an awareness and develop this skill whilst attending Little Stars.

• Offering plenty of opportunities for the children, staff and parents to voice their opinions. We have polling stations within our everyday practice to allow choices to be made, we regularly send out questionnaires and give the opportunity for suggestions to be made. We regularly ask our children to add their ideas, interests and suggestions to our plans and how we with set up our room. We also ask our parents/carers to directly impact their child’s focus week.
• Our setting has been adapted to allow as much free choice as possible. A lot of our resources are on accessible trollies, with many options of choice to encourage our children to make their own choices and decisions about what they would like to select for their sessions and what they would like to play with. We also offer a ‘choosing book’. This has pictures of our resources and equipment. This is used for children that may not be able to verbally communicate what they would like to choose but can still have an opinion by pointing to the pictures in the book.
• We also have a song board to encourage our children to select a song card to sing at story and singing time and we encourage our children to respect the choices their peers make.
• At snack time we have a self-service station. The children are encouraged to come over to the station and select from the choices that are on offer. We also offer ‘snack choosing days’. We will offer the children 2 options for what they would like for snack and then take a vote. The option that is most popular will be served for snack that day.
• We also have a high regard to all our children having good manners and encourage them to have a clear understanding of turn taking and sharing (age appropriate).
• We really promote ‘self-regulation’ within our setting. We achieve this by supporting all our children to recognise and understand their own emotions and the emotions of their peers. We use resources, puppets, books and discussions supported by our personal, social and emotional curriculum, to help all our children achieve this.

At Little Stars we promote Rule of law by encouraging the children to have an awareness and understanding of their own and others behaviour and its consequences. This will enable the children to have knowledge to eventually be able to distinguish between right and wrong. We also take ideas from the children and decide with the staff what are key rules and codes of behaviour are. So everyone within the setting has a clear understanding of our behaviour expectations. Our staff also reinforce our rules throughout the day, in our everyday practice.

• We work together as a setting to create a set of ‘Key rules’.
• We support our children’s understanding of their actions and consequences, by explaining to them how something they may have done could make others feel. Rather than just say-ing ‘sorry’. We also encourage the children that can, to verbalise their feelings and discuss with their peers, alongside the support and encouragement from a near by adult. This will teach the children to voice their opinions, views and feelings and start to resolve their own Conflicts.
• We also try, when possible, to invite members of our community into the setting such as the Police and Fire Service, who visit and discuss the Rule of Law and educating the children on how to keep themselves safe.

To allow our children to understand Individual Liberty, at Little Stars we teach our children to understand their individual value of their selves and to gain confidence to make their own choices. To achieve this, we must enable our children to have high self-esteem, self-confidence and self-awareness.

• We provide many daily opportunities for our children to take risks. We promote this by offering lots of ‘risky play’. Such as obstacle courses, climbing, using tools, swinging, hanging and taking part in forest school activities.
• We offer a varied range of activities each week, so we can allow our children to explore responsibility and to be able to reflect on their differences. Whilst encouraging the understanding that everyone is free to have their own ideas and opinions.
• We provide resources and opportunities for the children to create their own play. Being conscious that we don’t intervene too much and give the children time to create and explore their own ideas. This will help our children develop a positive sense of themselves and wil increase their confidence and their own abilities.
• We have also introduced a section on our plans that enables our children to evaluate their session and gives them the opportunity to voice their thoughts. We can then directly impact the following session from their views.

Mutual respect and tolerance is all about treating others, how you wish to be treated. We promote this within our setting by giving our giving the awareness that they must understand and appreciate each other’s differences, without allowing those differences to affect the treatment of anybody around us. We want to expose our children to their community and the wider community around them and to form relationships without discrimination. Our setting is fully inclusive and we ensure we include, respects and value all faiths, cultures and values.

As a setting we actively challenge any children, their families, our staff or anyone within our community expressing any opinions, beliefs or views that oppose British Values. Including ‘extremist’ views.

• Throughout the year we have a high regard to celebrating many festivals and celebrations that reflect our diverse culture in Britain. Such as Eid, Holi, Diwali, Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter and Chinese New Year.
• We encourage our children, their families and our staff to share their value and beliefs. Such as sharing a story or songs that reflect their culture.
• We provide resources and activities that challenge gender, cultural and racial stereotyping.
• We regularly take the children on visits for them to engage them with their wider community such as visiting a church, an old peoples care home or attending a religious festival.
• As a setting we have a strong emphasis that its not just about offering diverse resources within our setting, its also about us actively promoting respect and tolerance.