Lauren

Note to managers: The text below was written to give you a head start in explaining the Tapestry Messaging feature, and why/when you're intending to start using it, to your colleagues. Some bits you'll need to fill in yourself (in the underlined and italicised text), so we've attached a document version of it at the bottom. You should download and amend that before sharing it with others. We’re turning on a new feature on Tapestry: Messaging This is a secure system for direct messaging. It will replace [current system, if you have one] as of [date]. We’re doing this in order to reduce the number of systems you and parents/carers have to login to to communicate with one another. By using Tapestry for messaging, we can encourage parents and carers to also check and engage with recent observations, memos [delete if feature not used] or activities [delete if feature not used]. Unlike memos, this is a tool that is purely meant for conversations between two individuals [delete if feature not used]. You will be able to use it to message individual staff members or individual relatives. It’s a private chat in that only you and the person you’re communicating with will be able to contribute to the messages, but please be aware that managers, [list names of your managers], will be able to see those messages if they look for them. Our policies for usage will remain the same: - Hours: [e.g. although parents and carers will be able to send messages at any time, we do not want you to read or respond to them outside of working hours] - Message content: [do you have professional guidelines? Are there topics that you request parents contact a specific person about/via phone?] - Devices we’re happy for you to use it on: [Do you already have a Tapestry policy e.g. no personal devices?] - Other: [anything else you want to remind staff of re direct messages with parent and carers or each other] Messaging will appear automatically on the browser version of Tapestry once it’s been turned on, but the apps may need to be updated from the Play/App store [delete depending on your devices] before it appears there. [screenshots of it on each platform] If you would not like to be communicated with via this tool, you can turn it off from your edit preferences page but please speak with your manager before doing so. If you have any questions or concerns come and speak with [appropriate person]. Messaging - template of info for staff.docx

This quick guide will take you through the key aspects of the Tapestry Messaging Feature. You can find our detailed tutorials in the 'Messaging' section of our Tutorials Contents Page and contact us if you have any questions by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info. Who can use it? Messages are sent between two individuals. Staff can message relatives or other staff members. Relatives can only message staff members (not other relatives). If you don't want to send or receive messages, you can turn it off for yourself from your 'Edit Preferences' page in the drop down from your username on the browser version of Tapestry. Where can it be used? You can use Messaging on the iOS app, Android app, Amazon Fire app, or on the browser. You do need to be connected to the internet though and if you're using the app, you need to be on the latest version so make sure you update! What can it be used for? This is a direct messaging tool. Some of the things Tapestry users have told us they'd like to use this for are: A way for parents to send staff a quick notification about something e.g. they're running late for a pick up/drop off. A way for staff to send a quick note to a specific parent e.g. around a found item of clothing and directions on when to collect it. Conversations around something posted on Tapestry. Requests for in person conversations. Requests from parents for an additional session. A way for staff to share information or requests with each other. What else should I know? Managers on the account can view all messages between users. You currently can't send messages to multiple users (group messages) or send attachments via Messaging. We do plan on adding both pieces of functionality in later Messaging releases. If you would like to be updated about either/both, please get in touch with us by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info. You can find our detailed tutorials in the 'Messaging' section of our Tutorials Contents Page [link with anchor]. What do I need to think about/do before turning it on for my school/setting? Policies: you should share any existing policies you have around direct messages with the people you will enable Messaging for. If you don't have any yet, or they haven't been thought about in a while, it might be worth revisiting them or creating some new ones around the appropriate use of Messaging e.g. when messages should be sent/replied to, what parents can expect in terms of speed of replies, and if there topics that you request parents contact a specific person about/via phone. Who you'd like to be contactable: Are there staff members on your account who shouldn’t be contacted via Messaging e.g. because they don't login frequently and so are likely to miss messages? If so, you'll want to make sure it's disabled for them. It they are a full staff/pin only staff member, Messaging can be disabled for them individually via User Permissions. If they are a Manager, they will need to turn it off for themselves in their Edit Preferences screen. In this case we advise you turn on Messaging, but hidden to relatives, wait for all managers to have set their preferences correctly, then turn it on for relatives. Announcing the feature: Before you turn Messaging on, it's a good idea to tell the staff and relatives on your Tapestry account that you're going to do so, if there is a system you would like them to stop using instead, and what you'd like them to use Messaging for. We've created a Template of info for staff and a Template of info for relatives to help you get started with that. To give yourself chance to explore it, you might want to consider only allowing staff to use it to begin with. You can do that by setting the Messaging User Permissions for Relatives to Disabled. If there any additions you'd like to see to this feature or if you have any feedback or questions generally, please contact customer.service@eyfs.info.

We're excited to announce Custom Report Templates as our latest new feature! If you’re using an assessment framework that doesn’t come with a pre-made Tapestry Report Template e.g. a bespoke framework, or if the template you currently use doesn't quite meet your needs, this is one for you! Managers can create report templates to their own specification using any of the predesigned sections the Tapestry team have created or flexible text boxes to be titled how they choose. Staff can then use those templates when writing reports. Some key benefits: flexible reporting to suit any framework or flagsets access to predesigned modules to make the creation of a custom report quick and easy custom headings and sections to suit your individual requirements helps your school/setting go paperless as staff and relatives can access and contribute to them via their Tapestry account. You can create as many as you like, and as always, this comes at no additional cost. Find out more about Tapestry reports on our Reports feature page.

The latest update to the Android/Fire app update is here (version 5.0.0)! This is for those of you using the Tapestry app on Android devices and Amazon Fire devices. This release includes: The Online Register (currently in beta) - check and record absences, leave notes and sign children in and out on your Android mobile device. Care Diary for Relatives - relatives can now easily see Care Diary entries and add comments via the app. Reference material - the Development Matters reference material is now available to view in the app for when you need a quick memory jog. General improvements You can find out more about the above features on the Tapestry Online Learning Journal website. Some of you will be automatically upgraded to it and some of you will need to upgrade yourself from the Play Store and Amazon Appstore. Please note that the release will be rolled out over the next week, so if you can’t see the latest version just yet, please check back in a few days. This is the last version that users on an Android version lower than 5 (Fire OS 5) will be able to install. It is also the last one we’re fully supporting for devices on an Android version lower than 8 (Fire OS 7), meaning that while you will be able to download it onto those devices, you are more likely to experience small issues.

This is a small change but hopefully a useful one! Staff and relatives can now edit their own comments on Observations, Memos, and Reflections. This means they can correct any typos without having to delete the whole comment and readd it. The original comment will be recorded in each account’s History section so managers can still see the original comment if necessary.

Introducing Tapestry’s Online Register (beta)! This is the next major feature in our management system. It will show you the children you are expecting based on the regular schedules, extra bookings and absences you’ve added in the Booking section, and allows you to easily mark them in and out or as absent. You’ll also be able to: See the notes you’ve made on the bookings and add additional ones. Mark additional, unexpected, children in. Filter and sort the children list. Check past registers. Export any of your registers to PDF for your records. We’re not quite ready to release it on the apps yet, but we know many of you will be keen to explore, so we are releasing it as a ‘beta’ to start with. This means that whilst the released functionality has been fully tested and you are welcome to start using it, you may see some tweaks over the next few months - most notably, it becoming available on the apps. If there are any tweaks or additional functionality you would particularly like to see, or even if you just have some general feedback on it, please get in touch by emailing us: customer.service@eyfs.info. As a side note; if you would like to start using it on a tablet straight away, you can do so from your chosen browser. You can speed that up a bit by creating a link to it for your device’s home page. See how in this video. You may also notice that the side menu for booking has changed a little bit. This change should make register easier to access and help you to easily distinguish between the printable and the online registers.

The first monitoring screens are now available for your Bespoke frameworks. They focus on the number of times you have assessed each part of your framework, whether that be just by selecting specific parts, or by using your scales. As with most of our tracking screens, you will find one screen for individual children and one to see lots of children all at once. You will be able to access the relevant observations on both of them. You can find out more about Bespoke Frameworks on our website.

We have updated the time we send the 'daily' and 'weekly' email notifications. From today, they will go out between 3:30pm and 8:30pm GMT rather than in the early hours of the morning. The option for 'immediate' email notifications remains unchanged.

Children with the status 'Enrolling' can now be linked to memos, meaning staff can send information and updates to relatives before their child officially starts at the school/nursery/childminder.

This latest management system update is to enhance the printable registers. It includes: An option to export weekly registers as well as daily ones. The ability to include the times of each booked session for a child (e.g. 9am-12pm, 12pm-3pm, 3pm-4pm). The ability to include date of birth, booking notes (for daily registers only) and additional blank rows for unexpected children. Some new additional sorting options: youngest to oldest, oldest to youngest, and arrival time. A new ‘layout option’ section which allows you to determine your preferred default layout options and what you’d like to be included in your printed registers. These are all things that have been widely requested by our users, so if there is more you’d like to see, please do get in touch by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info.

Adding Care Diary to the apps is something we’ve been working on for a little while now, so I’m very excited to announce that the first release of it is here! If you are a staff member/manager on a Tapestry account and using an Android or Amazon Fire device, when you next update the app to version 4.2.0 you will see a new section in the bar at the bottom of the page – Care Diary. That will take you to a brand new set of pages allowing you to add, view, edit, and approve Care Diary and Accident entries. As you can on the browser, you’ll be able to make individual or group entries (with tweaks for specific children as needed), and collect signatures for accident forms. This is currently only available on Android and Fire devices and only for staff. If you use Tapestry as a parent/carer, or if you’re using an iOS device, you will still need to use the browser. An iOS update won’t be too much longer though, and we’ll be starting on the parent/carer version not long after that comes out. N.B. Note that the new version is released in phases by Android, so it might take a couple of days for the update to be available for you.

Those of you who have already started using our new Booking system will notice some additional functionality from today: When setting up or editing rooms, you can now add the minimum and maximum age of children in this room as well as the maximum capacity for the room at any one time, and the staff ratio. The Daily and Weekly Booking screens will show you how many staff are required for specific periods of time and whether you’ve hit your maximum capacity for children booked into a room. A calendar for each child’s bookings and absences on their Booking Dashboard page. You’ll be able to see a weekly and monthly view of that. To see what else you can do with the Tapestry Booking section, take a look at the 'Booking feature page' on tapestry.info.

The Tapestry Documents feature has been updated to allow you to say which relatives you’d like to be able to see each document. This means you can upload things for specific classes without risking the relatives of children outside of those being confused by them or having to search through all of your resources to find the ones relevant to them. It will relate to each file, rather than whole folders, and you can set the children whose relatives you’d like to see the files as part of the adding or editing file details process.

Following the success of the ‘Cherry Garden Framework’ (Branches 1-10), we have now implemented the ‘Cherry Garden Bridging Framework’. This is Branches 11 and 12 for Mathematics and English. This separate framework can be turned on from the Assessments section of the Control Panel. It has been designed for children with learning differences and focuses on criteria that would be expected for a typically developing child in year 1. It comes with the Baseline and Statement screens that those of you who have used the original Cherry Garden Framework will be familiar with, as well as a ‘Best Fit’ screen which is a variation on the ‘Target Setting’ screen. Assessments can be made as part of observations on the browser and on the apps.

A new iOS app update is now out (version 4.4.0). This is for those of you using the Tapestry app on Apple devices e.g. iphones and ipads. There aren’t any new features this time, it is purely for feedback improvements.

We are very excited to announce the first part of Tapestry’s management system – Booking. Once you’ve configured this new section with your setting’s opening hours, closures, session times, and rooms, you’ll be able to start recording which days and times your children are booked in for. You can set up regular schedules for each child as well as add extra bookings and record planned absences as needed. You’ll find screens to help you keep an eye on occupancy and for downloading daily registers, as well as providing you with information you’ll need for invoicing. We are fully committed to developing our management system further and have already started work on future releases. You can expect these to come out in phases and to include more screens to help with occupancy planning, a full billing and invoicing section, and digital registers.

Managers will now receive a notification when there are children's profiles on their Tapestry account that have been 'inactive' for 6 months. If you receive that notification you should consider whether you need to still be storing those children's personal data and whether it is in line with the data protection law of your country and your own policies. If you don't need to keep the profiles any more, you can mark them for deletion.

This new feature is one we’ve been looking forward to for a while. You can now add your own bespoke frameworks to Tapestry and assess against them within your observations. Any you add will only be visible to the staff and (if you enable it for them) the relatives on your account. You’ll need to create each framework in a spreadsheet. You can find instructions on what that should look like and the format it needs to be saved in when you go to the feature on Tapestry or within our tutorials. You can then upload it to Tapestry using our Bespoke Framework Importer. From there you’ll tell us which part or parts of the framework you want to be able to select and which are just headings. You’ll also be able to create a ‘scale’ to use when you’re making an assessment. This will allow you to record a more detailed assessment than just a tick – like refinements, or tiers. You’ll be able to edit your framework at any point and add as many different ones as you like. Bespoke frameworks need to be uploaded and edited on the browser version of Tapestry. Your enabled framework will appear on the browser and iOS app when you view and create observations, and it will be available on the Android app after the next update (coming soon!).

You can now allow relatives on Tapestry to see who has ‘liked’ observations and comments, not just how many times they’ve been ‘liked’. To enable this, a manager will need to go to the Control Panel then within the ‘User Permissions’ section, choose the ‘Relatives’ tab, then ‘Pages’ and set ‘View which users have liked a page’ to ‘permitted’. This won't allow relatives to see the names of other, unconnected relatives, or of children other than the ones they are related to (for example, on group observations). In those cases they will just see that a 'hidden user' has liked the post or comment.

A new iOS app update is now out (version 4.3.2). This is for those of you using the Tapestry app on Apple devices e.g. ipads. This is quite a small update. It is purely for a fix to a bug a few of you have been experiencing where observation previews have been showing up two or three times and the information displayed in them is sometimes getting muddled up with the previews above and below. This does not include any new features.

The 'Creative Development' Branch Map for the Cherry Garden framework has now been renamed to 'Expressive Arts and Design'. Everything else about it has stayed the same, it's just the title that has changed.

We are removing P Scales entirely from Tapestry because the Government has replaced P Scales with The Engagement Model and The Pre-Key Stage Standards. In October 2021 we permanently removed them for new users and for the accounts that already had them turned off. Today we removed them for the people who weren’t using them anymore but who either still had them turned on or who had historic P Scale data on their accounts. There will still be a few of you who can see them – if that’s you, it’s because we believe you’re still using them. We will have been in contact with you about a date for their removal for you, but if you haven’t seen that email, please get in touch by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info.

Today we have made some changes to the Cherry Garden framework. We have: - Amended some statements in the 'Communication, Language and Literacy' and 'Mathematical Development' Branch Maps. - Removed the statement ‘Responds to own name’ in Branch 2 of Attention and Understanding. You can find out more about these changes, including a short explanation of why we have made them and a full list of the amended statements in our forum post about it: https://eyfs.info/forums/topic/53915-changes-to-the-cherry-garden-framework-february-2022/

We have released a new screen to help you monitor the accidents recorded on your Tapestry account. You can find it in the 'Tracking' section under ‘Care Diary’ or ‘Accidents’ (depending on which you have enabled). There you can filter for specific children and choose the date range you’d like to look at. The screen will tell you how many accidents matching those filters have been recorded and give you an overview of each of them. That page can be exported as it is, or you can go straight from there to the ‘Download Accident Forms’ page, where you can export a PDF for each child containing only their own accident records.

The latest update to the Android/Fire app update is now out (version 4.0.6). This is for those of you using the Tapestry app on Android devices and Amazon Fire devices. There aren’t any new features this time, but there are quite a few tweaks and bug fixes, all of which should improve your general experience with it. Some of the most noticeable ones are: - Improvements to the EYFS 2021 flag selector. - Fixed a bug so that the app does now honour the ‘show me my Key Children only’ preference for managers. - Improvements to how the app handles drafts and edits to drafts. This isn’t for anyone using the Apple iOS app, but there will also be an update available for that in the near future.