We are making changes to the way we document and secure our children’s progress.
Here is our WHY
Through observation and consultation with children/families and our staff team we have evaluated the time we spend writing up and documenting children’s learning and the time we get to physically be present, participate and scaffold learning experiences – we decided the balance was off!
We asked our children, to get a gauge of how much they took the lead on their learning and understood their learning. What are you learning about? When answering this question, most of the children spoke to us about the curricular learning throughout their environment and not their own personal journey.
We asked our parents what they thought about the observations that were put up for their children. Whilst all were complimentary about the detail that was put into each observation, the majority admitted they would by happy just with some photos to see what they had been up to – favouring twitter as our best form of communication.
What we have been doing
At present each staff member is given 2 hours off the floor per week to ensure planning and paperwork is up to date and that your child’s learning journey is documented. Given the number of staff in our team that means that each day there are 2 members of staff off the floor to allow for this. 4 hours in which children do not have that additional staff member each day.
We brought this to the staff team meeting at in-service and we searched for solutions. We discussed firstly from a staff member perspective their feeling towards the written workload. The consensus of the staff team was that with the demands of write up’s they were finding themselves struggling to settle into the moment as their minds would be preoccupied with all the other aspects of the job. As a staff team we are all in agreement this is not the service or provision we want to provide, we want to be present for the children, we want the freedom to follow their lead, we want to ensure quality provision with maximum interactions, and we want to do all this without compromising securing your children’s progress and development.
What we plan to do
Each staff member will be given 1 day every 6 weeks off the floor to evaluate their key children’s progress, planning for and setting challenge steps for moving forward. In between this time snapshot stories will be added with your child’s input to support their understanding of their learning journey. Staff will work hard to promote a sense of autonomy for your child in regard to their learning. Our journal systems will be used to document and track your child’s Health & Wellbeing, Literacy and Numeracy Progress throughout their time with us. Staff members will use their observations and knowledge of your child to support learning experiences and outcomes using their personals interests and vehicles for discovery.
Environment planning takes place alongside the children in the same way as before ensuring that children are exposed to and can explore cross curricular learning opportunities and experiences daily.
We intend to roll out our new way of working from next week. Week commencing 21st August 2023.
2 staff members each week will be given their non-contact time, and this will be staggered to ensure we are able to closely monitor and evaluate this new way of working. You will begin to see staff members use snapshot stories more often as they start to map your child’s journey alongside them.
We hope in turn, that you will be able to see an increase in your child’s understanding and confidence in their knowledge of how to share this journey with you.
Trial period
As with everything it is important that we enter a trial period, critically evaluating the provision we provide to ensure we continue to get it right for our children and families. We are proposing that our initial trial period for this is up until December this year at which point, we will be reaching out for feedback. We will be particularly interested to get feedback from those parents who are returning this year and have only known our way of working up until now.
In the interim if anyone has any questions, feedback, or suggestions please do not hesitate in contacting us.
Thank you as always for your continued support.
Team Colquhoun x
