How to manage your Tapestry accounts if you have several packages

[EmilyTapestrySupport]

When taking out a Tapestry subscription for a whole school or multiple key stages we recommend having separate packages, rather than having one large package. So, if you are a school we recommend having a package for reception, and then one for KS1 and one for KS2.

 

If you do decide to take out a package per key stage this leaves you with two options at the end of the academic year in terms of how to set up the packages. I will lay out both of the choices below so you can decide how best to set up your accounts.

 

Option 1

 

Have a package assigned to a specific group of children. This way at the end of the year you won’t need to move the children between packages but you might need to remove 'old' staff, add new staff and edit your groups.

 

This option would work best in settings where practitioners/teachers swap classes or years at the end of the year, so you could keep adding observations and assessments to the children as one continuous journal. The other advantage of this option is that you wouldn't need to transfer relatives between packages and therefore have to go through the process of reactivating them on the new account.

 

With this option, you might want to ensure the package is labelled something specific for the children, such as 'KS1 2017'.

 

If you don’t want to use a specific cohort name, a manager can change your package name at the end of each year, or whenever necessary, by going to the control panel -> settings -> your setting and entering a new one in the ‘setting name’ field. If you do this please ensure you email us at customer.service@eyfs.info with the new name so we can update this on our system to ensure the two names correspond.

 

At the end of the year you can remove staff from a package by either making them inactive or by deleting them. You can find the links to the tutorials which explain how to do both of these options below as well as the link to our tutorial on how to add staff members if you need to add new staff to a package.

 

How to make staff inactive

How to delete staff

How to add new staff

 

Another thing you would need to consider with this option is whether you would need to swap over key children that are assigned to staff, and perhaps any manual groups you have set up. This tutorial here covers how to set up key children if you add new members of staff and how to edit key children groups if those need changing If you need to adjust the manual groups on your package you can do so by following this tutorial.

 

Option 2

 

Have your packages assigned to each key stage e.g. KS1, rather than specific groups of children. This way you would keep the staff in the packages and would need to transfer the children between them. You would also need to include relatives in the transfer so they could login to the new package and this will involve a process of reactivating them on the new package.

 

Almost all children’s data can be transferred across, including manually overridden assessments, the only thing that isn’t included in a transfer is a child’s ‘all about me’ so if you had filled this in and wanted to keep and transfer it you would need to export it as a PDF. Please note that it's not possible to upload this back onto Tapestry in the all about me section though, the only place it could be uploaded is to a report.

 

If this is the option you choose you can follow this tutorial here when it comes time to move children between packages.

 

For this option it means you wouldn't need to keep re-naming your Tapestry packages when children move between them.

 

I hope this article helps you decide on how best to set up your accounts, if you have any questions please direct them to customer.service@eyfs.info.