Tracking question

[Guest]

Hi

When tracking children and looking at progress do you compare to where they were when they started with you or compare to the previous term or both?

Just wondered what others do.

Thanks

[Panders]

In Kent they have developed a tracker system where you can pull up individual records to see a child's whole journey, I thought that was helpful, but not essential, but it did show where there were possible delays/dips/regressions maybe, so they could be planned for in future, it could also be used during Supervisions to discuss with individual key persons on performance and progression of child.

[Guest]

Both! As Panders says our aim is to ensure children are progressing at as steady a rate as it is possible for small children to do, so we identify plateaus and dips as soon as poss so we can keep things ticking over.

We look at data together as a year group each half-term to make sure we really have covered the curriculum in our planning too - sometimes that shows up as a 'dip' - happened once when we thought we'd covered something, but it coincided with a chickenpox outbreak, hence the year group dip!

[AliceinWonderland]

We look at both, to show true progression it's good to see how far they have come since they started with us, but we also track termly just to keep on top of any slight dips, although sometimes this is because a child has only just moved age bands or maybe they have been off ill etc. I have developed some spreadsheets to track things like planning and observations, this helps with supervisions as i can discuss with practitioners if certain areas are not being planned for or if children are consistently not getting any ons in certain areas. Also am in the process of making a spreadsheet to track children's progress each term as didn't really like the one our early years team said we should use.