The Foundation Stage Forum Community
Welcome to the FSF – a community for early years professionals. Engage in conversations, offer and receive advice and support, make connections. Discover our library of education articles and podcast episodes to enhance your reflective practice. Working together to achieve high-quality early childhood education.
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Five arguments against a change to early years ratios
by Nathan Archer
Nathan Archer, Director of the International Montessori Institute at Leeds Beckett University, describes 5 clear arguments against the current suggestions to relax ratios for the early years sector.
Podcast: Supporting children and families who are English Learners
Anya and Jules chat with Ana Elisa Miranda, who shares her own experience of learning new languages, what educators can do to welcome children and families who are learning English, and how being bi/multilingual/literate enriches a child’s experience…
Early Years Wellbeing Week
Early Years Wellbeing Week raises awareness of mental health for the early years workforce. Founded by Kate Moxley, and now in its 5th year, here is a downloadable resource to support you.
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Timetables
No idea how/why my reply is in the quote box louby 🤷♀️ welcome to the forum Miss Hilton, I take my hat off to you and all Reception teachers/TA’s, we can find it difficult to manage with 8:1 with the higher number of children with challenging behaviours we seem to have now, and 6 weeks later you get to do it with likely only 2 of you and having to get the phonics and maths in 😔, we recognise many chn aren’t as ‘school ready’ as cohorts in the past were, toilet training is happening much later, independence doesn’t seem to be on the agenda at home and sadly technology as a babysitter has a lot to answer for. Good luck, hopefully other reception teachers will come along with some helpful strategies 🤞 -
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2023/2024 17th Nov/8th Jan/25th March - Safeguarding Awareness Recognising and Responding to Abuse (Level 2) - Children and Young People Location Southampton
Safeguarding Awareness Recognising and Responding to Abuse (Level 2) - Children and Young People This course is essential for people who have regular contact, or periods of intense but irregular, contact with children and young people to ensure that those working with children and young people understand and know how to safeguard children and how to respond when they suspect abuse. Length of course One day. Who should attend Early years providers Childcare providers All types of schools Health professionals Professionals working with children or families Please note Southampton City Council staff should access Safeguarding Level 2 training through Learning and Development. You will be able to Understand what we mean by safeguarding children and young people. Identify possible signs and symptoms of abuse and know what to do if neglect or abuse is suspected. Identify vulnerable groups. Understand the key legislation to safeguard and protect children and young people and your role within it. Reflect on learning from Serious Case Reviews and consider emerging key themes including Contextual Safeguarding. Understand the Southampton Children’s Advice and Duty Service, Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) and how to referral. Understand PREVENT and how this links to safeguarding children and young people. Fee for Training Southampton City Council Maintained Schools: £40 Subsidised price for Southampton PVI Early Years & Childcare providers and voluntary organisations: £35 Academies, free schools and other organisations: £50 Session dates Friday 17 November 2023 - 9am to 3pm - Civic Centre Monday 8 January 2024 - 9am to 3pm - Civic Centre Monday 25 March 2024 - 9am to 3pm - Civic Centre -
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2023 3rd October - New to Year 6 Location Southampton
New to Year 6 Tuesday 3rd October 9am to 3.30pm Studio 3 MAST Mayflower Studios 142-144 Above Bar Street Southampton Hampshire SO14 7DU The course will combine formal inputs with group activities and provide practical suggestions to develop procedures in Year 6 Learning Outcomes: Share best practise in the teaching of reading, writing and mathematics in Year 6 The assessment framework and assessing writing at EXS and GDS Considerations for statutory moderation of writing Please bring along on the day: Writing workbooks from across the ability ranges Medium term planning Overview of reading texts for the year Assessment framework for writing End of Year 6 exemplification materials Fee for training: Southampton City Council Maintained Schools: £30 Academies, free schools and other organisations: £35 -
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The Lost Art of Climbing Trees
Admittedly, the slightly sensationalist title suggests that children don't climb trees anymore. This is not actually the case. There is a brilliant tree in my local park and children form an orderly queue to get their turn on it. It's the perfect 'beginner's' tree. Lots of low branches, multiple routes up, and when you get to the top, your head emerges from a cloud of leaves where you can shout to your parent - sat on the conveniently placed bench below - "look how high I am!". Here’s the tree in question with my 4-year-old making his way up: So, what’s the point of this piece if tree climbing is still happening? The fact is, it’s not happening nearly as much as it used to. In my opinion there are two obvious reasons for this. The first is that now there are other things children can be doing with their spare time. You only have to go back a decade or so to find a difference in the kind of on-tap visual entertainment available for children, and certainly a whole generation will take you to a time when children had far fewer options for entertainment, and so they had to be more creative in their play (cliché time: ‘when I were a lad’/’it’s not like it used to be’ etc etc). The second reason is risk. Whether it be at home or at nursery/school, children aren’t exposed to the same risks that they were a few decades ago. Thankfully there have been really positive changes over recent years to introduce more ‘risky’ play into our settings and schools. I particularly love the emphasis woodwork is now getting in the EYFS (Pete Moorhouse’s excellent work has a lot to do with this). Progress hasn’t necessarily been fast enough though – my colleague, Jules, wrote this article way back in 2010 about the value of risk and challenge in the Early Years, and finding a balanced and proportionate approach. The benefits of letting our children have opportunities to climb trees are significant, as ‘Nature Kids’ point out: · Our child is building their own awareness, ability to assess risk and prevent injury · They are building their focus, spatial awareness and coordination skills · We are offering them a huge opportunity to build their self-confidence and not just through the physical act of climbing but also their ability to make the decisions that got them there · It goes without saying that their strength, flexibility and physical abilities improve each and every climb · Tree climbing is a challenge for the mind; enhancing problem solving and analytical skills · Children develop their own sense of achievement, particularly for those that maybe couldn’t get there last week, month or year but did it today! · A child learns that injuries are a part of growing up, and a grazed knee or splinter in the finger is a lesson in itself. I’ve visited two nurseries recently that have actually designed their playground around ‘climbing trees’ which I think is such a great idea. There was a time, when the trees would have been removed and the whole space covered in rubber! Wouldn’t it be amazing if every Early Years setting had a climbing tree? Dr Lala Manners has written a helpful article that advises on how to support parents to understand the benefits of ‘risky’ play. This Coffee Break was written by SEND Advisor, Stephen Kilgour. -
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Mandela Model Workbook - developing belonging in your setting's community
Professor Eunice Lumsden has written a free resource designed to support early years leaders in developing belonging for families and staff in a setting community. With a focus on reflection and reflexivity, the Mandela Model Workbook uses the letters in MANDELA to support conversations around key areas: Make time, Acknowledge, Needs, Differences, Educational Experiences, Life experiences, Age Each section has questions to inform your holistic approach to inclusivity. The resource is available to download for free from the Tapestry website here. There is also a video of Professor Eunice Lumsden talking about the Mandela Model Workbook which you can access from the same link. -
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Podcast episode: A child-centred approach to PE
Have a listen to this podcast episode about what to consider when developing your PE curriculum, with PE lead Omar Green. -
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Management system update: Extra Charges, Assign Bill payers, and more.
We have just released the latest round of management system features! This round includes the following: 1. Extra Charges You can now add products, services, and consumables as ‘Extra Charges’. You’ll set the price for each of these when you create them. You’ll then attach the relevant ones to each child’s Regular Schedule or as one-off extras to automatically appear on their next invoice. 2. Assign bill payers and send invoice links This release gives you the ability to select the bill payer/s for each child from their list of relatives. After you’ve generated an invoice, you can choose to send it directly to them simply by clicking the ‘Send’ button when viewing the invoice, or ‘Send invoice’ from the cog on the full list of invoices. Those parents and carers will then receive an email and an internal Tapestry notification with a link to the invoice in. 3. A filter for invoice statuses Next time you go to your list of invoices, you’ll be able to see a new ‘status’ filter. With this filter you can select which types of invoice you’d like to see, meaning you can quickly and easily hide ‘cancelled’ ones, pick out the ones that are currently ‘unsent’, or find those that are ‘sent’ but not marked as ‘paid’ yet. 4. Prefilled new Regular Schedules based on the child’s previous one. To save you some time when you’re adding in your new Extra Charges or when you just want to make a small change to a child’s Regular Schedule, new Regular Schedules will now auto-populate with the child’s most recent previous schedule. You can then edit, add, and remove those sessions and charges as necessary. 5. New configuration options for invoices If your bill payers find the full breakdown of Regular Schedules on invoices a little bit too much, you can swap that out, or additionally include, a summary view for the PDF. That still shows the different sessions that are included but tells you the quantity of each session rather than listing each individually. With both the summary and detailed view you can choose whether to include the rates you charge or not. 6. Additional tweaks We've also included a few little tweaks to improve the general usability of the Invoices feature: - Session prices visible on the Sessions Config overview page. - Invoices of children with the statuses ‘Awaiting Deletion’ and ‘Inactive’ remain on your Invoices list (but please do still export copies of all their invoices for your own records). - An improvement to the "next child" functionality when working through invoices. You can read more about the Invoices feature on our website.- 1
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Importance of Reflection for CPD
Hi there. I am currently studying my level 3 in childcare and I am wanting to discuss the importance of reflection for CPD. I believe it is extremely important in order to maintain high standards of teaching and care with the children you are working with. Any other comments, please feel free to share -
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Receiving invoices through Tapestry
If your child's setting (nursery, pre-school, childminder etc.) have decided to use the Booking and Invoices features on Tapestry, they are able to book children into sessions and then invoice them accordingly. After they have created an invoice for a child, they can choose to send this to you directly via email. Once they have sent an invoice through their Tapestry account, you will receive an email with a link in that you can follow to open the invoice. The email will have the subject 'New Invoice from Tapestry'. If your child's setting have told you they have sent an invoice to you but you have not received an email, do check your spam/junk folder as it may have been filtered into there. Once you open the email you can click where it says 'View Invoice' to open up a PDF of the invoice (1). Please note, invoice emails are sent from our noreply email address, so any replies directly to the invoice email will not be received. If you have any questions about an invoice, please direct them to your child's setting. If they have set up a contact email for relatives, this will appear in the body of the email (2). As well as receiving an email with a link to your invoice, you will receive an internal notification within your Tapestry account. If you log in to the browser version of Tapestry, you'll see a bell icon in the top right-hand corner by your name. If you have a new notification, a number will show up next to this icon indicating the amount of unread notifications you have. If you click on the bell icon it will bring up a list of your notifications. You can click on the invoice notification to open the invoice as a PDF. Below you can see an example invoice. I'll go through what you can see here: At the top you will see some basic information about the invoice including: the setting name, the child's name the invoice is for, the period it covers, the invoice number, the invoice date and due date for payment. If you see some extra text/information above the 'Summary' section, this will have been inputted by your child's setting. In the 'Summary' section you will see a breakdown of the charges included in the invoice. You may see an extra section with a blue heading in the 'Summary' which breaks down the bookings that are included in a child's regular schedule. Whether you see this or not is dependent on your child's nursery/pre-school/childminder's settings. Underneath the summary you will see the total amount due. If you see some extra text/information below the 'Total to Pay' section, this will have been inputted by your child's setting. Depending on what your child's setting have decided to include on invoices, it may be spread across several pages. At the top you can see how many pages are included in the invoice. If you have extra pages, you may see a heading in blue at the top that says 'Regular Schedule Bookings'. This is a more detailed breakdown of the sessions that are included in the invoice. Back to contents page -
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Podcast Rewinds
Over the summer we revisited a couple of previous podcast episodes from our back catalogue: How can we support young children through transitions and change - with Sonia Mainstone-Cotton STEM in the early years - with Natalie Bent and Denhue Harris We hope you enjoy them, and don't forget you can share any reflections in this thread.
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