Quick summary
- Aistear is the NCCA's curriculum framework for children from birth to six.
- It's organised around four themes: Well-being, Identity and Belonging, Communicating, and Exploring and Thinking.
- Each theme has four aims, and each aim has six learning goals.
- It applies to every early years setting, not just ECCE-funded rooms.
- It's designed to work alongside Síolta, the national quality framework, not as a substitute for it.
A framework, not a curriculum in the traditional sense
Aistear (Irish for "journey" in case, like your author, you didn't learn Irish...) was developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) as the early childhood curriculum framework for Ireland, covering birth to six years. It's deliberately not prescriptive about activities, timetables or resources. Instead, it describes what children are learning and developing, leaving practitioners to decide how that happens in their own setting, with the children under their care, through play and everyday interaction.
This matters because it means there's no single "correct" Aistear activity, what matters is whether what's happening in the room is genuinely supporting a child's well-being, identity, communication and thinking, however that's achieved.
The four themes
| Theme | What it's about |
|---|---|
| Well-being | Children being confident, happy and healthy |
| Identity and Belonging | Developing a positive sense of self, valued and respected within family and community |
| Communicating | Sharing experiences, thoughts and feelings with growing confidence, in a variety of ways |
| Exploring and Thinking | Making sense of the world by interacting, playing, investigating and testing ideas |
Each theme breaks down into four aims, and each aim into six learning goals, a structure that gives practitioners something concrete to plan and observe against, without dictating exactly how.
How Aistear and Síolta fit together
Aistear and Síolta are often mentioned in the same breath, and it's worth being precise about the difference. Aistear describes what children are learning. Síolta, the national quality framework, describes the standard of the service delivering it, the environment, relationships, planning and management around the child. Neither replaces the other; most settings use Síolta to shape how the service runs, and Aistear to shape what happens in the room day to day.
From framework to daily practice
In practice, Aistear shows up in a service through three connected activities:
- Observation, noticing and recording what a child does, says and shows interest in.
- Planning, using those observations to shape what's offered next, whether that's a material, an activity, or simply more time and space for something a child is already engaged with.
- Documentation, making the learning visible, both to inform future planning and to share with parents and, eventually, primary school.
This cycle: observe, plan, document, and observe again, is what turns Aistear from an abstract framework into something a room leader actually uses on a Tuesday afternoon.
Practical advice
- Don't try to tag every observation against all four themes, most genuine moments of learning sit mostly within one or two themes, and forcing all four dilutes the record.
- Build documentation into the same moment as the observation where possible, rather than trying to reconstruct it from memory at the end of the day.
- Share what you're seeing with parents regularly, not just at a termly meeting, it's both good practice and one of the more reassuring things a service can do for a family.
- Use Aistear alongside your Síolta-informed practices rather than treating them as two separate compliance tasks.
How Tot Tracker helps
Tot Tracker's observation tools let staff record what a child is doing in the moment and tag the skills demonstrated, including Montessori skills, building a developmental record over time that's easy to share with parents through the app, without adding a second, separate paperwork process on top of daily practice.