The World Health Organisation defines this as the ‘physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and motor development’ of children between 0-8-years-old. These early years are critical because it’s the time when our brains are developing most quickly—forming more than one million connections each second—laying the foundations for the rest of a child’s life.

To prepare our youngest learners to be successful primary school pupils, we’ve created a carefully structured early childhood development (ECD) programme that supports the youngest pupils to achieve academic learning alongside developing socio-emotional, psychomotor and creative skills. It’s important to ensure that formal academic instruction is started at an early age because there is growing evidence of gains in later schooling because of early mastery of core foundational literacy and numeracy skills.