Choosing The Right EYFS Furniture For Learning Environments!

Whether it's a nursery setting or a school setting, children spend the majority of the weekdays inside the walls of a classroom. Creating a comfortable and engaging learning space can remove the risk of your children becoming restless and resistant towards lessons.

How do you create a great learning environment? Simple. You use the best early years furniture suppliers and provide your class with furniture that is designed to keep them engaged and invigorate them.

Selecting the proper furniture choices can improve student engagement and comfort, helping your classroom become an environment to promote child development and growth.

Discover the key considerations you should make before you purchase any EYFS equipment and how you can bring your dream classroom layout to life! 

Key Considerations

It's important that before you buy any EYFS furniture, you should consider the safety, comfort, flexibility and storage factors of the furniture you're buying. Doing this will help ensure you that you're acquiring the best possible early years furniture for your class and helping them develop.

Doing this research may seem tedious and time-draining at first, but taking this step will eliminate the risk of purchasing faulty furniture and putting your children at risk of injuries and/or delaying their academic abilities.

Safety

Being the most important factor for any classroom to abide by, the safety of your children should always be put first. Buying cheap EYFS furniture might save money on your budget, but that very same furniture might be made from poor-quality materials, leading to a child enduring a serious injury from the furniture breaking.

When you are looking at early years furniture, make sure that you remember these key questions:

• Has the equipment undergone the British Standards Institution's (BSI) vigorous tests?
• Are the materials being used to manufacture the equipment high-quality and durable?
• Does the furniture contain added safety features, like rounded corners and a smooth surface?
• How much experience does the manufacturer have in the industry?
• What do reviews and testimonials say regarding the EYFS furniture?

Following these guidelines should help you acquire the safest early years furniture on the market and help your children develop a variety of vital skills whilst minimising the chances of serious injuries occurring in the learning environment.

Comfort

Comfortable nursery school furniture can massively reduce the chance of your class getting restless and agitated as they try to get comfortable on the furniture. Not only can uncomfortable furniture decrease student engagement, but it can also increase the risk of a student developing a musculoskeletal disorder.

To avoid this possibility, it's important that you look for early years furniture manufacturers who design ergonomic furniture. Usually, these same companies will offer multiple different sizing options for each piece of furniture to match the age group that will be using the piece.

Flexibility

Versatile and flexible early years furniture can support diverse teaching methods by allowing teachers to quickly manoeuvre furniture to reconfigure the classroom to accommodate different lesson ideas and activities.

Your class will love seeing the classroom transform and become a new exciting learning environment to explore, keeping them fully engaged with the lesson until the end. Having furniture with castors or built from lightweight materials can help a piece of furniture become more flexible.

If you're looking for versatile nursery furniture, it's important to thoroughly analyse the materials used to construct the furniture, as well as any additional features that have been implemented to provide another level of
manoeuvrability for your furniture.

Storage

Keeping your classroom neat and tidy is imperative for any learning environment that wants to foster academic growth. The key to creating a tidy and clean classroom space is by introducing effective and innovative storage units.

Acquiring a storage unit for your classroom provides benefits to both students and teachers, helping the learning environment stay productive and beneficial for everyone!

Whether your classroom adopts a versatile, small storage unit or a big, durable storage solution, every classroom should have the necessary furniture to avoid the classroom becoming cluttered and messy. Implement a storage unit into your classroom today and reap the benefits from it.

Types Of Furniture To Consider

If you're wanting to create a brilliant learning environment, it's important to focus on the pieces of furniture that are often used. Things like tables, desks, seating, storage units and even specialised areas should be focused on due to how often they are used by staff and the pupils.

Below are a list of options relating to each piece of early years furniture and how they can impact your classroom for the better.

Tables and Desks

Forming a vital part in any educational environment, every classroom will have tables and desks present in the environment. Considering how heavily they are used throughout the day and what a vital role they play in a child's education, it's important that your children have access to great early years tables and desks.

Having height adjustable tables allows the children to work in comfort and protects them from bad posture. These types of tables are immensely popular with a lot of primary schools across the UK as they provide a fantastic level of versatility and help provide a solid surface to work from.

You could also consider the shape of your table to take advantage of collaborative designs. From square tables to trapezoid desks, each shape of table can provide a classroom with a multitude of unique benefits.

Seating

Alongside tables and desks, seating options are also incredibly popular in any learning environment you encounter. It's widely believed that seating plays the most important role in helping children feel comfortable and relaxed when engaging with lessons.

Firstly, make sure that your chairs suit your children's height and age. It's important that a child can rest their back comfortably to avoid any injuries occurring.

For children in nursery, you might consider using chairs with a pommel present. A pommel helps a child maintain a proper seating posture and avoids the chance of discomfort and instability.

Chairs could also have rubber feet protectors placed on their legs to help reduce the noise made by moving the seat. Doing this helps children focus on the lesson without being distracted by a noise and having to reinvest themselves into your subject.

Storage Units

Storage solutions can come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, giving you full control over what unit would look the best in your classroom. Due to the wide amount of options available, any early years setting will be able to add an effective storage unit to their environment to help with organisation.

Modern storage units are often extremely versatile, allowing for units to easily be moved and repositioned to meet the needs of the staff or activity. An added benefit to any storage unit is if it has anti-scratch and low-noise castors, allowing for manoeuvrability without causing issues or damage.

Some storage units on the market can also be versatile in the way that they are used. If you get a storage unit with a mirror attached, you can create an organised learning environment whilst providing a resource for mirror play.

Finally, you can find a storage unit in nearly any shape and size possible. Early years furniture should always be offered in a variety of sizes and shapes to accommodate different levels of space and room.

Specialised Areas

Furniture can also play a vital role in establishing a specialised area, most commonly known as a zone. Zones can be created to establish an area within a classroom that serves a specific purpose. From quiet reading zones to messy play zones, nursery school furniture helps with establishing an effective zone.

The key aspect to creating a zone is identifying what equipment is needed for the activity to be carried out effectively.

For example, if you were creating a reading zone for your children to relax in, you may consider getting a den structure and filling it with pillows and blankets. You may include a storage unit where class favourite books are displayed and can be easily self-selected by the children.

An effective zone is an area which provides everything a child needs to engage and complete the given activity. Furniture is key for establishing these types of areas and helping children flourish in activities.

Design and Aesthetics

The design and aesthetics of your early years furniture can be equally as important for helping create the perfect learning environment. From modern wooden designs to traditional plastic ones, each type of design offers a variety of unique benefits, which we will explore together.

Materials

In the present times, there's a wide variety of different materials that can be used to create school furniture. Whether it's wood or plastic, metal or foam, each material offers it's own blend of positives and negatives.

Currently, the most popular material that is used to produce school and nursery furniture is wood as the material provides a beautiful natural look to any environment it's placed it.

Boasting incredible guarantees, wooden furniture will often last a long time and is durable enough to withstand heavy usage. However, it's important that you research into each of the benefits and problems and decide for yourself.

Colour Choices

Colours can assist in helping to establish a mood and atmosphere for your classroom. Bright colours will encourage your children to be active and excited, whilst more neutral colours can promote an atmosphere of focus and calm.

We would advise looking at all of the colour options available on the market and think about how that colour may be perceived by your class. Try to avoid any dark colours as they can lead your children to feel intimidated and lethargic.

Layout

Designing and planning your classroom layout can be a difficult task for a lot of early years staff and practitioners. To establish an effective classroom layout, you have to understand how each piece of furniture compliments other pieces and how this could impact your class.

All the way back in early September, we announced our partnership with Millhouse (an expert school and nursery furniture manufacturer) and spoke about the fantastic services offered by these experts.

One of these great service is the completely free and comprehensive space planning service for indoor furniture. This service allows you to spend time on focusing on other important factors whilst a team of specialists work on designing the perfect classroom layout, including some recommendations.

Sustainability and Budget Considerations

In recent times, a lot of schools and nurseries across the UK have had a focus on two key factors when it comes to purchasing new early years furniture: budget constraints and sustainability.

For a lot of schools and nurseries, these two factors play a huge part in deciding whether to acquire a piece of furniture.

Have a read below to see our tips on how you can balance both of these factors whilst considering the previous factors we've covered.

Durability

Classroom furniture should be built to be long lasting and durable. Durable equipment allows you to focus more on other important matters and less on replacing your recent piece of furniture.

A lot of cheap furniture options will sacrifice the longevity of the product by using cheaper materials. Often, these cheaper materials can result in furniture breaking early and causing multiple other issues. Try to look for furniture that is made from materials like Accoya, Redwood Timber or Maple Melamine.

Even though the initial investment will be larger, you will be saving a lot more money in the long-term as you won't have to worry about repairing or replacing old furniture for a very long time.

Eco-Friendly Options

Being an environmentally-friendly school can help your school look great in the eyes of the local community. Acquiring furniture that has been constructed from sustainable sources and manufactured in an eco-friendly way shows that your school is dedicated to the cause.

A few materials that are classified as sustainable and eco-friendly include:

• Accoya
• Stokboard
• Redwood Timber
• Duraply
• Maple Melamine

Keep your eyes peeled for any pieces of nursery school furniture constructed from these materials and check to see if your chosen manufacturer is producing their products in an environmentally-friendly way and abiding to environment laws.

Cost-effective strategies

Budgeting can cause a lot of issues for a school, especially when it comes to refurbishing your classroom.

If you want a great cost-effective strategy, have a look around your classroom and write down the most used objects in your room, for example:

1. Chairs
2. Tables
3. Book shelves
4. Storage unit
5. Toy box

Once you have created the list, start by focusing on acquiring the most commonly used furniture and finishing with the least used furniture. It's important that heavily used pieces of furniture are durable and comfortable as this will help them stand the test of time and keep students happy.

As years go by, you can start using your budget to acquire more furniture, working your way down the list.

Create The Perfect Learning Environment Today!

Hopefully you have found this guide useful and use it to help when you are shopping for your next classroom refurbishment. If you have any questions or queries that you would like help with, feel free to contact our specialist team today for the best advice in the industry!