Development Matters for Early Adopters

[Lauren]

We now have a system for early adopters using the new Developments Matters statements.

Following guidance from Dr Julian Grenier, the author of the new Development Matters, and Gill Jones and Wendy Ratcliff from OFSTED, we have decided against allowing users to tick the statements. You can read more about our thinking behind it in this article written by one of our education team, Ben Case.

Instead, we have added the ability for you to ‘flag’ the observation as being evidence towards an Area of Learning. This will create an organised bank of observations for you to refer back to.

It consists of 2 key parts:

1) Flags. You may already be familiar with these from Tapestry Reflections. They act as ‘labels’ that you can apply to observations, organising them according to what they relate to. You will find flags for Development Matters, ELGs, and Checkpoints as well as other descriptors e.g. CoETL, Motivation for Learning, and reasons to celebrate.

2) Reference material. Whenever you select a Development Matters Guidance 2020, Checkpoint, or ELG 2020 flag, you will also be shown a list of reference material. This includes the Development Matters and ELG statements but also a variety of other useful articles and videos. These will provide a reminder as you become familiar with the new guidance and support all staff as they make meaningful observations about the development of each child.

 

We know many of you really wanted to be able to tick statements, and this is quite a big change from how you were assessing before, but we are confident that this approach is more aligned with what Ofsted want to see. We are hopeful that this will save you a lot of time and generally improve provision in early years in the long run.

We do want to work with you though. If you have concerns about how to use it or ideas for things that would help, please get in touch by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info.

An assessment screen to follow the progress of your children is not available just yet, but we are working on it now. It will enable you to know which children are falling behind and who will need extra support, while still relying on your professional judgement.

Flags and reference materials are not currently available on the apps.