Video · Teachers Media
Learning And Development
Learning and Development is the fourth EYFS principle, spelling out how young children learn and what areas of development should shape provision. It's where the framework becomes most practical for planning — and where the "characteristics of effective learning" often get less attention than they deserve.
About this video
The Learning and Development principle names seven areas of learning (three prime, four specific) and three "characteristics of effective learning" (playing and exploring, active learning, creating and thinking critically). The areas are what most practitioners plan around; the characteristics are how those areas are learned. Both matter, but the characteristics are the more foundational — they describe the disposition children develop that will support all future learning.
The prime areas — communication and language, physical development, personal social and emotional development — are foundational because they underpin everything else. A child whose communication is limited, whose gross and fine motor control is developing slowly, or who struggles with emotional regulation will find the specific areas (literacy, maths, understanding the world, expressive arts and design) far harder to access. Strong EYFS practice front-loads investment in the primes.
The characteristics of effective learning are where the framework signals a distinctive view of what young children's learning looks like. Not sitting still and receiving instruction, but exploring, playing, having a go, keeping trying when things go wrong, making links, having their own ideas. Practitioners who protect time and space for these dispositions tend to see richer learning across all seven areas.
Balancing areas and characteristics
- Front-load the prime areas. Communication, physical, and PSED investment pays back across all the specific areas.
- Plan for the characteristics. Explicitly build "having a go", "keeping trying", "making links" into your provision — don't assume they'll happen on their own.
- Adult interaction as the engine. High-quality adult-child interactions — sustained conversations, open questions, thinking aloud — are the single biggest driver of learning outcomes in EYFS.
- Genuine choice within a purposeful framework. Children learn when they're invested. Invest them by giving real choices within a well-designed environment.
Discussion prompts
- Which characteristic of effective learning is best developed in your setting? Which needs more deliberate attention?
- How much of your adult-child interaction is directing versus genuinely conversing? What would shifting the balance change?
- When you observe a child persisting through a difficulty, what conditions made that possible? How could you build more of those conditions?
Try this in your classroom
- Pick one characteristic of effective learning and plan a week of provision that explicitly develops it.
- For one session, focus your interactions on sustained conversation with two or three children rather than briefer interactions with many. Note the difference in what you learn about them.
- Observe how children respond when something goes wrong (a tower falls, a piece won't fit). Which children keep trying, which give up? What could support the second group?