Planning-To many to choose from

[jenny_neale]

Hello all, I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with planning.

Just wondering how you manage all of the paperwork for planning, there are so many different kinds which ones do you use and how do you do this. Some examples would be useful.

🙃

🙃Long term planning, short term planning, weekly planning, in the moment planning, continuous provision planning, activity planning, schema plans plus many many more

[Cait]

Hello Jenny

As a retired Preschool Manager, I can say that I’ve tried many, many ways of planning over the 25years.  I found it very variable, and what worked with one group of children didn’t always work with another.  I don’t think there’s any hard and fast rule, as long as there’s some evidence of planning, and you can justify and explain your methods properly.   
Hours can be spent planning, only to find that it’s not in the direction that the children want to go at all!   
My children had individual plans, based on what I considered were their next steps in learning, and as long as I could tie that into whatever direction we ended up going, and show good progression, then I didn’t worry too much about it.   
Of course, I’ve been retired for 6 years now, and things will have moved on.  Hopefully though, children’s progression has stayed the same.   

[Mouseketeer]

Hi Jenny, like Cait I’ve been around the block and back again with planning formats and have now ripped up the lot and do no paper planning as such or not as far as long, med, short goes, no planning meetings either.

We follow a ‘loose’ ITM approach, started recording the teachable moments/focus child and then thought why are we doing this, so gave that up too, the only thought we really put into it is if we know we have groups of children needing boosting in an area e.g if our cohort tracking shows our oldest boys are really showing a lot of progress in reading we will look at our provision and think about how we can engage them more in reading activities/using resources and we scribble down the intent/implementation/impact on a white board (if that makes sense), some weeks nothing is added to the board, some weeks 2 or 3 things :-) 

[louby loo]

On 12/04/2021 at 19:06, Mouseketeer said:

Hi Jenny, like Cait I’ve been around the block and back again with planning formats and have now ripped up the lot and do no paper planning as such or not as far as long, med, short goes, no planning meetings either.

We follow a ‘loose’ ITM approach, started recording the teachable moments/focus child and then thought why are we doing this, so gave that up too, the only thought we really put into it is if we know we have groups of children needing boosting in an area e.g if our cohort tracking shows our oldest boys are really showing a lot of progress in reading we will look at our provision and think about how we can engage them more in reading activities/using resources and we scribble down the intent/implementation/impact on a white board (if that makes sense), some weeks nothing is added to the board, some weeks 2 or 3 things :-) 

This is very much like us. Most of our planning is inside our staffs heads!   We do have a sort of planning meeting- as a group we go through a list of all the children a check they are on track or not, and then 'plan' any appropriate actives etc.

Our long term plan is literally a list of dates of events/festivals.

We're due ofsted any-day  and I hope this is good enough 😳  At our last inspection the inspector loved the fact the staff new the children so well, and that most could answer question about any child and not just key-children. she never even bothered looking at any paperwork!     I'm hoping this fits with the new EYFS ethos- with less emphasis on paperwork..... however it seems inspectors can sometimes appear to set there own agendas so who knows 😩

[Mouseketeer]

34 minutes ago, louby loo said:

This is very much like us. Most of our planning is inside our staffs heads!   We do have a sort of planning meeting- as a group we go through a list of all the children a check they are on track or not, and then 'plan' any appropriate actives etc.

Our long term plan is literally a list of dates of events/festivals.

We're due ofsted any-day  and I hope this is good enough 😳  At our last inspection the inspector loved the fact the staff new the children so well, and that most could answer question about any child and not just key-children. she never even bothered looking at any paperwork!     I'm hoping this fits with the new EYFS ethos- with less emphasis on paperwork..... however it seems inspectors can sometimes appear to set there own agendas so who knows 😩

It sounds good to me.

We are also +4yrs from our last inspection, I can still hear the inspector at our last feedback saying ‘I can see that staff know all the children well but I can’t see it written in learning journals what their next steps are and as this is an EYFS a requirement I can’t give an overall outstanding’ ...so we’ll see if they really don’t want to see it all recorded next time round 🤞