Fundamental British Values

Policy Statement

The fundamental British values of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs are embedded within the Early Years Foundation Stage.

As part of government plans, we will teach children in an age appropriate way to protect them from religious radicals. Our setting will ensure the following is embedded during day to day events.

• Enable children to develop their self-knowledge, self-esteem and self-confidence.
• Enable children to distinguish right from wrong.
• Encourage children to accept responsibility for their behaviour, show initiative.
• Enable children to acquire a broad general knowledge of respect for public institutions and service in England.
• Enable children to acquire an appreciation of and respect their own and other cultures.
• Encourage respect for other people.

As practitioners, it is our duty to demonstrate what this means in practice. We can encourage children to see their role in the bigger picture, encouraging children to know their views count, value each other’s views and values and talk about their feelings. We encourage children to show views by a show of hands to choose or by using their own themes for role play and areas of learning.

We can provide activities that support decisions, turn taking, sharing and collaboration. Children should be given opportunities to develop enquiring minds in an atmosphere where questions are valued.

Children need to learn and understand their own and other’s behaviour and its consequences and learn to distinguish right from wrong. This can be established with codes of behaviour, our positive posters, using kind hands etc. ensuring these rules apply to everyone and the rules are understood by all.

We will encourage children to take challenges big or small to develop self-esteem, self-knowledge and increase confidence and abilities. We will provide obstacle courses, experiments where we debate and talk about events that children have experienced. We intend to promote small group discussions; these could be a reflection on an activity or a discussion on how children are feeling about going to school. Such activities help children to develop a language of feelings, responsibility, reflect on differences and understand we are free to have different opinions.

All who attend need to understand our ethos of inclusiveness and tolerance where views, faiths, cultures and races are valued in all aspects. The setting will engage the children in the wider community by extending their knowledge and understanding to respect their own faith and other cultures. We will embrace festivals, celebrate through world days, allow children the opportunity to discuss the difference, seek information from questioning while explaining the importance of tolerant behaviour such as sharing and respecting other’s opinions.

We will promote diverse attitudes and challenge stereotypes, share stories with children that can reflect, value diversity of children’s experiences, use resources to show that some children as young as 5 may have to work in other countries and show children examples of how other children live in the world. We must challenge gender, cultural and racial stereotyping.

We, as early years educators, we have a duty to ensure these fundamental values are maintained to demonstrate an awareness and understanding of the risk of radicalisation in their area, institution or body. It is our duty to reduce the threat to the UK from terrorism by stopping people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. We have a duty as part of the education sector, along with other authorities such as the police, to have regard to the need to prevent people becoming drawn into terrorism.

Priory View Pre-School

This policy was adopted by the Joint Management Team:

Vicky Peters - Owner

Delphine Pouncy – Deputy Manager

Christine Johnson – Deputy Manager