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Sharing progress with EYFS leaders

by Anya on December 8

4 min read:

 

In this article I will outline how you can use observations and reflections with the Areas of Concern screens to share progress and support given with Senior Leadership Teams.

In the following paragraphs we will look at how Tapestry can help you show SLT that you: 

  1. Understand and know the child’s current level of development and have therefore marked them as ‘No concern’.
  2. Understand that they need additional and consistent support so they can access the learning.
  3. Can demonstrate the plan of additional support with Reflections and the support in practice with Observations.
  4. Have monitored your provision until you were satisfied that the child can access the learning without such focused support.
  5. Have created bespoke flags so that you can easily monitor support in specific areas to suit your provision/setting.
  6. Have reflected back after some time to ‘check in’ on a child’s progress and whether they need any further focused support.

This article is written as a guide following the article Using Observations and Reflections with the Areas of Concern Screen and alongside the webinar Communicating progress to EYFS leaders using Tapestry with Jack and Stephen from our Education team.

As mentioned in the previous article, you can use Observations and Reflections to support your practice and provision for children who you have concerns and/or no concerns for.

When would you use reflections to support your provision for children you have concerns and/or no concerns for?

The following information is an example of how you can create reflections and use observations to support and demonstrate your provision for a child you have no concerns for, but still need to provide consistent support:

You would use reflections for children you are marking as ‘no concern’ on the AoC screens when you understand and know that the additional support a child needs is expected. For example, if a child has English as an Additional language then you might expect that they need additional support to access the learning but you are not concerned because you know why they need support.

So, you may write something like this:

As you can see, I have included an action plan to show the planned support I will provide Abri and a date to review their progress and support needed.

Then, as I provided the relevant support I would create observations and reflections which I could link to the original reflection above (1). I also attached the relevant EYFS 2021 flags (2) which make sure that the reflection feeds through to the AoC screen and created my own bespoke flagset for EAL (3).

Using flags means that you can use the filter feature (1) to view reflections and/or observations with specific flags. So, in this case, if I wanted to check my EAL provision then I could filter by the EAL flag (2). This will then only show me reflections with the EAL flag linked to them (3).

This is something you can use to show SLT if they ask for you to demonstrate your support for a specific area such as EAL.

From this screen you can also see a Timeline of any entries for ‘Concerns’, ‘No Concerns’ or ‘Review’. Here I can show SLT a timeline of the AoC entries specifically for Communication and Language, giving them an overview of my professional judgement about Abri’s progress so far.

Finally, I created an additional Reflection some time later to show that I have continued to monitor my provision and support for Abri. I may come back at another point in the year to check in on my provision for Abri and how they are getting on.

 

This could be much the same for children marked as ‘Concern’ or as ‘Review’. For both, reflections would still give you the opportunity to voice your concerns and planned support.

You might also like to mark a child as ‘Review’ and create a reflection with notes about your concerns before meeting with SLT. Then you can discuss with SLT any concerns you have and you can work together in your meeting to discuss further support.

Don’t forget that you can always take the relevant guidance along with you if SLT don’t have a good understanding of the new EYFS:

In the webinar Communicating progress to EYFS leaders using Tapestry, Jack and Stephen created they discuss the following:

  • How can leaders know that progress is outstanding without data?
  • What about children with learning differences?
  • How can Tapestry support staff and SLT to demonstrate their provision to governors or Ofsted?

So, if you have any queries about those subjects then I’d suggest you take a look at the video!

You can also email us at customer.service@eyfs.info if you have any further questions.

 

 

Anya

Product Support Specialist and Education Advisor

As far back as she can remember, Anya had an interest in child development and psychology. In 2010 she began studying Childcare and Education at college and began her career in education working in a local nursery. After college, Anya studied a BA (Hons) Degree in Education and then moved to France to work as a teacher in a Bilingual school. A year later she found a wonderful job at an international school in Belgium as an Early Years teacher. Anya returned to the UK two years later and studies child psychotherapy, and during her studies she worked as 1:1 support for neurodivergent children and children with SEMH needs within a mainstream school. Now at Tapestry, Anya has discovered a previously untapped love of finding bugs in features. As part of the Education Team Anya works with sector professionals to create educational resources, and you can hear her on the odd podcast episode too.