Lauren

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.

Our latest initiative comes following the renewed calls for high-quality CPD. We’re well aware of the benefits of CPD but also appreciate that many settings struggle to offer their staff suitable opportunities. This can be due to time and/or costs involved. So, recently, we have been working on a feature we’re calling Tapestry CPD. It’s a site where educators can find engaging and interactive courses. They’ll cover education based topics e.g. areas of child development, and Tapestry specific topics e.g. how to set up your Tapestry account for a new academic year. You can find them by clicking on the ‘CPD’ button on the browser version of your Tapestry account, or by going directly to https://cpd.tapestry.info/. Anyone with a full staff or manager account will be able to login using their Tapestry details and access all the courses for free whenever they like. Everyone else (even people who don’t use Tapestry at all) will be able to see the slides for some of the courses, but the forum areas and some of the interactive elements will be hidden. Today, as we release it, there are 5 available courses: Additional Support in Mainstream Education KS1 - KS2 The First Year Communication Approaches EYFS 2021 on Tapestry Starting a New Academic Year on Tapestry And you can expect more over the coming months! We are committed to regularly creating new ones in response to the sector’s needs.

The P Scales assessment framework is being removed from Tapestry. This is because the Government has replaced P Scales with The Engagement Model and The Pre-Key Stage Standards. You can add The Engagement Model to Tapestry using Flags (see our tutorial on adding bespoke flag sets) and we have a separate assessment framework for The Pre-Key Stage Standards (you can turn that on from the ‘Assessments’ section of your control panel). We have already been in contact with those of you who we believe are still using P Scales and will shortly email anyone who we believe has historic P Scale data, but if you know that’s you, and you wish to keep a copy of any P Scales assessment data, please make sure to download it before the 21st of February. You can do that by exporting a PDF and/or CSV of the Summative Assessment Individual and Group View screens (found in the Tracking section of your account), and by exporting PDF journals for the children with P Scale assessments. Just follow our PDF export tutorial and make sure to include P Scale assessments. This will not affect any other assessment framework on your account and all of your observations will still exist – it will just be the P Scale assessments themselves that will disappear (as though you’d just turned off P Scales). If you have any questions, concerns, or need more time/help to export your data, please email customer.service@eyfs.info from the email address you use to access your Tapestry account, with the subject ‘P Scales being removed’.

We will soon be making some changes to the Cherry Garden framework. The first is to rename the ‘Creative Development’ Branch Map to ‘Expressive Arts and Design’. You don’t need to do anything for this, the name will update automatically in the next few weeks (late February 2022). The content of the Branch Map will stay the same. The second change does include something you do need to think about and possibly do. As you may know, the 'Communication, Language and Literacy' and 'Mathematical Development' Branch Maps include milestones from the respected Routes for Learning materials (https://hwb.gov.wales/curriculum-for-wales/routes-for-learning). These materials have recently been updated to reflect the latest research. We have made some minor amendments to the Branch Maps, in conjunction with Cherry Garden School based on these changes. Most of the changes are just wording updates, but one statement is being removed entirely and will no longer exist as part of the Cherry Garden Framework. You can find the details of the amendments in the document attached below this message. These changes will apply to assessments you’ve made previously as well. So, for example, if you can see that a child is assessed as ‘Secure’ (or whatever you’ve called your refinements) in ‘Reacts to close contact with a familiar adult’, after these changes are applied, the assessment will remain as ‘Secure’ but it would be for ‘Responds to close physical contact with a familiar person’ instead. As ‘Responds to own name’ in Branch 2 of Attention and Understanding is being removed entirely, any assessments you’ve made of that will disappear. They will no longer appear on existing observations, and the statement will no longer show on the ‘Statements’ and ‘Baseline’ screens. If you are using the ‘Term Progress’ and ‘Strand Scores’ screens you may also notice that the figures for Attention and Understanding Branch 2 there change as well. There will be 1 fewer statements and any ‘Score’ applied to the ‘Responds to own name’ statement will no longer be included. As such, the ‘Score/Max Score’ and so the ‘Percentage Score’ may change. If you want to keep a record of any of those assessments or a record of any of the figures as they are, please make sure to export a PDF copy of them before February the 21st 2022. If you have any questions or need more time, please get in touch with us by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info. Cherry Garden Routes for Learning changes.pdf

To upload a bespoke framework to Tapestry you'll need to have it saved as a 'CSV' file. This is just a type of Excel file. Below you can see an example of a completed bespoke framework CSV. You may find it useful to download a copy of it (click on the file below to download it) and keep it open as you read through these instructions. ks1y1 Example Bespoke Framework.csv When you're creating your CSV file you will need to consider two things: the ‘Components’ and ‘Details’ of your framework. I'll cover these later in the tutorial, but you can also read more about them in this tutorial. Details Each column you see in the screenshot above is for a particular type of Detail. The Details are the full content of your bespoke framework. They are what you’ll see when you’re looking at the assessment picker on observations. They will be any and all subject area names, aspect names, statements, objectives, or targets. In my screenshot everything apart from the row A of the spreadsheet (highlighted in yellow below), is a Detail. Row A is different as these are the Components of your framework, we’ll come onto this concept in a bit. I’ll now breakdown the example CSV further for you. If you look at Column A you can see in row 1 the title of this column is ‘Subject’. So listed in this column are all the subjects (English, Maths, and Science etc.) that make up this framework. Everything highlighted in the screenshot below, so all the subject names, are ‘Details’. Only row 1 is not a Detail. Column E in the CSV shows the 'Statements'. Again, everything highlighted here is a Detail. That's everything other than the title of ‘Statement’ on row 1. It is important that similar Details all go in the same column e.g. all statements should be grouped together in the same column. Repeated words You may have already noticed that in column A, I have repeated the subject names quite a lot, but all the Statements in column E are unique. To see why, let’s take a look at some of the full rows for English. Each row needs to make sense by itself. You need to make sure that you can pick any cell and be able to tell from the rest of the row where you'd be able to find it in your framework. If I looked at C14 I would find 'Word Reading'. I would be able to tell that I can find it in 'English' and then 'Reading' within my framework by looking at the cells to the left of it, and that there will be nine 'Statements' within it - 'Apply phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words' down to 'Re-read these books to build up their fluency and confidence in word reading'. I could look at any of those 9 statements and see that they all belong in 'English' > 'Reading' > 'Word Reading'. Lets take a quick look at what this will look like on Tapestry so you have some context. When you first import it into Tapestry via the 'upload your CSV' tool it'll look something like this: You can see how the further right columns are nested into the further left ones. When it is enabled for your observations, it'll look like this. As you can see, repeating a Detail doesn't mean it'll show up multiple times, but you need to do it so Tapestry knows where to put all the nested Details. Back to the spreadsheet! Every time you want to repeat the same Detail you can either rewrite it (which is what I've done), or use “ “. This lets our system know that you want to just repeat what is above. You can use this as many times as you like, it will keep looking up the rows until it finds a cell with something in (even if that's just a blank space to indicate that nothing should be there). Blank Cells You may have noticed there some blank cells, for example the first row of English > Spoken Language. Here you have something for column A (Subject), B (Area) and E (the Statements) but nothing for columns C and D (the Aspects and Statement Groups). It is absolutely fine to leave a cell empty. These boxes won’t appear as empty when you have uploaded your framework to Tapestry. Below you can see how this framework appears on Tapestry. Look immediately under 'Spoken Language'. There was nothing in column C or D, so the picker has jumped straight to what was in column E. Components You've likely already thought about 'Components' without really realising it. These are your overall headings for each type of Detail - they will each be a broad word (or words) to describe all the things in a column. For example, in the column with ‘English’ and ‘Science’, the Component could be ‘Subject’. The other Components for this framework are shown highlighted below in row A of the spreadsheet. They are: Subject, Area, Aspect, Statement Group and Statement. These Component names won't be visible on the assessment picker within observations, but they will be useful later to help you quickly find the assessment you're looking for. Final notes on the spreadsheet content Earlier on I mentioned that you need to put all similar Details in the same column. To explain that a different way, don't mix Components in the same column. E.g. Don't put any Aspect names in the same column as any Statements. If you do, you'll find that your framework gets all jumbled up when it's on Tapestry and it won't be so easy to navigate. Finally, please do not skip adding a Component name if you can't think of one. It's fine to use something generic as long as you know what it means e.g. 'Aspect 1' and 'Aspect 2'. Saving the file as a CSV Once you’re done you need to save it as a comma delimited file (CSV). This is the final step before you can import it! All you need to do is: Select 'File' and 'Save As'. Find where you want to save it within your file explorer. Give it a name, and click the 'Save as Type' drop down. Then choose CSV (Comma delimited). And that's it! Now you're ready to import the spreadsheet into Tapestry. For some help with how to do that, you might want to go to the Bespoke Frameworks: Uploading your CSV file tutorial. Alternatively, you can skip ahead to the tutorial on 'Bespoke Frameworks: Scales, Details & Components'. If you've got any questions, email us here: customer.service@eyfs.info Go back to Main Tutorials Page

Tapestry is constantly being worked on. Although we tend to only announce big new features in our newsletters, social media pages, home page colourful boxes, and yellow banners, we make small improvements every month. Here are some of the most interesting small additions made in October: The ability to sort the Activities Catalogue by ‘most recent’. This means you’ll be able to see the latest activity suggestions at the top of your page, rather than having to scroll though the list. The ability to edit which children you’re exporting a PDF journal for after you’ve already started the process of deciding what’s included. A new filter on the Observation page so you can look for posts that don’t have any flags selected. Permanent removal of the P Scales assessment framework for new users and for the accounts that have already turned it off. The official advice is that P scales should no longer be used. We have left it on for the people who are still using it, but will be removing it for most of them over the Christmas holiday. If you think that affects you and you haven’t already spoken to us about it, please do get in touch – email customer.service@eyfs.info.

We are aware that many of you are only using the new Development Matters curriculum guidance and would prefer not to see the Birth to 5 Matters aspect flags (the gold coloured ones) or reference material. You can now turn off the Birth to 5 Matters part of the EYFS 2021 flag set from within your control panel. Just ‘configure’ the flag set and untick the box that asks if you would like to include the Birth to 5 Matters aspects. Our enabling and disabling the Birth to 5 Matters flags and reference material tutorial shows you that in more depth. If you turn them off, you’ll notice a few changes: · Any Birth to 5 Matters aspect flags you’ve already added to observations and reflections will disappear. · You will no longer be able to use the flags filter to look for observations or reflections with Birth to 5 Matters aspect flags attached. · No reference material relating to Birth to 5 Matters will show up when you’re making an observation or reflection. · You’ll no longer be able to see sections for the Birth to 5 Matters aspects in the Areas of Concern or EYFS 2021 thoroughness screens. You will still be able to see everything relating to the 7 Area flags and the Development Matters reference material though.

You may have already started using flags within your observations and reflections. They are premade sets of single words or phrases which you can use to categorise your observations and reflections. Some examples of the existing flag sets are ‘EYFS 2021’, which let you highlight when an observation or reflection is about a specific area of learning, and the ‘Play’ flags, which let you say when a post includes an example of a particular type of play (‘Free play’, ‘Construction play’, ‘Games with rules’ etc). These were created by the Tapestry team, but if you have ideas for your own unique ones, or you’d like to create your own versions with the specific words you use in your school or settings, you now can! Within the control panel of the browser version of Tapestry, you’ll find an easy to use interface for managers to create and order them. Our ‘Bespoke flags: adding and editing flag sets’ tutorial explains how. This latest feature gives you the flexibility of hashtags without the downsides of having to remember which words/phrases you’re using or the risk of typos. They’re a bit prettier too – they show up as little colourful labels (colours you can set yourself). As with hashtags, you can click on flags within saved observations or reflections to find other posts with the same flag selected. You can also use the ‘Flags’ tab at the top of the Observations and Reflections pages to find them.