Recording Practice

[amarrian]

We are a nursery school that educates three and four year olds. They all turn five in their subsequent primary school so we never have to provide an EYFS assessment using the scale points. Because we have been going for 20 years, we have well established ways of planning for children's development and recording childrens achievements using individual child profiles. With the advent of the EYFS, we have adjusted the way this information is presented broadly to conform with the six areas of learning. We believe (subject to the continuous improvement principle) that the way we record, and what we record, gives an accurate evaluation at any one moment of the child's current standing and demonstrates the progress they may have made

 

This works for us, for our children and for their parents. But does it work for Ofsted? In other words, is there a need (or is it advisable) for our record keeping to reference more precisely the development matters contained in the Practice Guidance, or anything else for that matter? I appreciate that it is not good practice to use the tick-off list approach but I do feel nervous of a situation where a particular Ofsted inspector might be looking for greater conformity with the government's literary output and find it lacking. Maybe I do them a disservice?

 

How are others approaching this?

 

Anthony

[Susan]

Unless I am mistaken, there is no right way to record progress/ attainment. The statutory requirement is for profile scores to be reported to both the LEA and to parents but if you do not have children needing this assessment then their is no statutory requirement! Learning Journeys are, of course, all the vogue.

Surely the most important thing is that you know your children and that you have some records. If your recording system works for you then I would hestitate to change it.

If someone else knows differently, hopefully they will be along soon!

[Guest]

I would agree with the above reply. At a recent conference Jan Dubiel spoke and said in effect that the only statutory assessment was the EYFS profile and that prior to that it was important that practitioners knew their children. He also said it was perfectly reasonable for evidence of the childs learning to be a practitioner's knowledge of the child which might not be written down. Hope that helps a little.

[amarrian]

We've done a considerable amount of work tying our current record keeping into the individual scale points. Because we hold this information in a database we have flexibility in how we report it. So, we can list all the exercises that contribute to a scale point or take a particular exercise and see what scale points are relevant to it. BUT, we've done this work with the scale points and, given our age group of 30 - 59 months, I wonder whether we shouldn't be making our links into the development matters contained in the Practice Guidance instead. The *only* reason we do this is in the hope that it makes an Ofsted inspector's life easier (and, I suppose, demonstrates that we've paid some attention to the EYFS documentation); the linking has no benefit otherwise

 

Anthony