Our work is heavily based upon the work of Vygotsky, with acknowledgements to the contributions that Piaget and Bruner made to the debate. We have worked on Vygotsky’s theory that language is a primary psychological tool, which transforms social experience into higher mental processes. We aim to encourage teachers to use the language of learning, to make learning explicit and thereby give this language of learning to our children; we encourage youngsters to actively use what they already know from their everyday lives to make links with more abstract concepts in new learning. Vygotsky talked about the importance of ‘inner speech’ in transferring the external world into our internal world. We encourage youngsters to plan to reflect upon their learning at all points. Like Vygotsky, we encourage our teachers to be relentlessly optimistic. We believe that learning leads development and that we can help our children to progress by giving them a ‘mediated learning experience’, with staff mediating and modelling learning. We understand the importance of social interaction within learning and we encourage peer support and collaboration in order to drive higher level thinking. This is based upon Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’, which recognises that what can be done with adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what can be done alone.