Mouseketeer

Hi FM, I feel quite overwhelmed with it all, I’m usually a grab the bull type person who’s ahead of the game but not this time, I think we have had so much to manage and deal with this year that to throw this massive change (and 2 if we choose to go with one of them - I know not statutory) at us seems too much right now (but maybe I’m feeling this as I’ve had staffing problems which has meant I’ve been back in ratio pretty much full time so there’s been no time until now to even consider what it will all look like come September and feel a bit on the back foot, I also think reading to much on Fb groups hasn’t helped 🤦‍♀️ You might have seen my post with a few questions around how I can still make Tapestry work for my setting and especially how to formulate a plan of attack to share with staff (I have a couple who are going to find moving away from statement ticking difficult, it’s taken years to fine tune it and now that seems to be going out the window ...though from J & B replies I’m beginning to feel less anxious about how it will work. As manager I still want to be able to look at different cohorts and know where the problems are or where more challenge is needed (I’m still not quite convinced concerns/no concerns is enough for high achievers), I think having the same 30 chn everyday and within a year age range has to be more doable to remember where they’re all at than having 50 or 60 a week, doing between 6 hours and 30 hours and covering 3 different year group cohorts (or more if you manage a nursery provision). Oral hygiene - I’m not planning on introducing teeth brushing, more info to parents I guess and give it more prominence as planned activities, more resources. Health visitors - I don’t often feel they support our concerns when we raise them or they pass the buck back to us to speak to parents if we have health concerns like weight/hygiene etc and if we manage to get them to arrange an appointment they feed back to parents that it’s ‘age appropriate’ (even when a child hasn’t started toilet training at 4 and no developmental reasons), once a parent has heard that they don’t want to listen to our concerns 🤷‍♀️

Oh no! When did you finish? Well officially that is, it never ends, I’ve had loads to catch up on due to staffing issues last term 🤦‍♀️

What music 🎶 yeah Louby Loo an extra day left 👍

Thanks for your insight Ben, I’ve watched your video too and will get the rest of the staff on that, I have asked staff to stop statement ticking for the next cohorts a while ago so they’re already getting that out of their heads.....hopefully 🤞

Oh wow, Best Wishes for your retirement (also more than a little envious), enjoy your garden, books and whatever else you find to fill your time 🥂 I have a few more years hard labour yet Louby 🤦🏻‍♀️

Hi Jack, Thank you for taking the the time to work through my questions and reply to them 😊 let’s see if I’m getting this .... 1. You can only assess as emerging/expected against the ELG’s and not the 0-3 or 3/4 checkpoints? 2. I don’t know...I’ve confused myself 🤦🏻‍♀️ I think I was thinking I’d be able to assess an observation by saying this child is ‘expected’ at 0-3yrs in Maths/number patterns (the age bands before the ELG’s) 3. Get it 👍🏻 4. Thank you for looking into the option to unselect colour as you can now when exporting summatives. 5. I also think the AoC cohort screen is going to be where the most useful EYFS tracking comes from e.g it will show if we have ‘concerns’ say in a few of our oldest boys in literacy and what are we going to do about that and use reflections related to 3 I’s. I’m now thinking all the children in my 2022 cohort should be working within the 3/4 yr band unless we have concerns. Thanks again, it’s helped me clarify some points in my own head before trying to feed it to other staff 👍

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 🤞

Hi I’ve had a play around with an ob using the ELG 2020 and the concerns/no concerns screens this morning, from that I have the following thoughts/questions: 1- when you assess an Observation and click on an area are the statements that open up based on the age of the child you’re observing? 2- will there be aspects at a later date or just areas (one of the main things I liked was the breaking down of PD to gross & fine, they could be expected in gross but emerging in fine? 3- I was surprised the statements that came up could still be ‘ticked’, are there tracking screens that you’d need to have ticked them to give any information? 4- I like the PDF screen for group concerns/no concerns (took me a while to realise I had to select assessments and not just totals to get the names in a given group list, will there be an option to export this to pdf in black & white? (or I’m going to get through a lot of coloured ink - might just have been that I was using an iPad) 5- will there be a group Summative Assessment screen like the age bands we have now that just shows if chn in a cohort are emerging/expected? I’m not sure how it will know if I’ve assessed chn in a cohort against 0-3yrs or 3/4yrs? 6- if a child is right on 3 yrs, or is 3 yrs but high achieving for example in an area how do you choose to assess them as emerging or expected in 0 to 3yrs or 3 / 4 yrs? Sorry, I know that’s a lot of questions, I’ve only just found time to explore it all, one of my thoughts is that 0 - 3yrs is too big an age range to just say a child is emerging/expected (but feel B25 is broken down into too many ages/ranges making it quite restrictive), I can see this is where professional judgement comes in but still feel that information needs recording somehow/somewhere. Thanks for any advice/thoughts or even a ‘you’re overthinking this’, I’m just trying to figure out how Tapestry can still work for me as a tracking tool 🤔

Has anyone else found it’s only this thread affected by the split screen thing going on?

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 :-)

Nor me and it seems like a waste of practically the whole right side of my iPad screen in landscape mode (and I don’t like having to hold it in portrait 🙈 )

I have info about posters in the thread on the right on my iPad and a smaller thread screen, and speech bubble things at the top (do you think we can we change the way it looks?).

Me too froglet 🙏 Enjoy the Easter break term timers and hope the full timers have a well earned long weekend off 🙂

Well earned Sunnyday .....Just a tad envious here 😜

We have just been given a Bobby Car stride along, low to the ground and solid so they don’t tip as they get on/off, I’ve looked to purchase a couple more but they are quite pricey if you can even find any.

I also loath the term ‘big’ school...in their little minds what is this ‘big’ place they’re going to, just say ‘reception class’ if they have to say anything, it’s only across the flipping playground 🤨

Maybe I could stretch mine backwards 🤔

It’s too late for us to plan by the time we get the forward terms from the funding teams, for the last 2 years we’ve been paid the last week of our open spring term with the summer funding so many of presumed the same this year as the Summer funding is a week longer than we’d usually run too but on no! we’ve now run an extra week in the Spring term that won’t be funded and been told we should have started back a week later after Xmas, finished a week earlier for Easter or asked parents to pay for the last 4 days of Spring term....too late to do any so will have to carry it 😡 and Summer will either run to 23rd July and need to pay staff an extra week or close a week early so staff have worked 38 wks but not claim a weeks funding 🤦‍♀️

I went for the Friday as sooooo many had said they weren’t well, but thankfully no side effects or sore are, 🤞2nd is as easy.

I’m putting ours on eBay 🤣...joking aside it’s madness, sadly we don’t have any cm’s left to offer them to 🙁 would it be acceptable to bag them up and put out ‘help yourself’ to parents after a few days?

A bit late but hope you’ve had a good one 🍷 🍰

I think so from the wording in the Gov publication about the tests. did you get sent the correct blue guidance booklets for staff? We haven’t and I’m not printing them so will have to make do with a link.

I think it’s more about the timing that whoever has decided to help us, tests we should have been included when schools/attached nurseries started them and masks we needed at the start of the pan(ic)demic when we had to try and source PPE ourselves ....not even to be given it necessarily, but a way to purchase at reasonable cost through our counties would have been something 🤷‍♀️ I feel my county just hung us out to dry, all safely working at home sending out the odd pat on the back email ....they couldn’t even pick up a phone and ask what help we needed or how things were going 🙁

Thank you, feeling less overwhelmed now I’ve seen template letters for staff and recording forms to print, was thinking I’d have to generate it all before the 22nd, hope the printing goes ok 🤞

Do the forms for recording get supplied or links to print? Thanks for the link Louby ...you have to wonder after all this time why the 22nd ...I could have done with the Easter holiday first (as I’m sure many of you could) to get my head around it all ready to share with staff and get paperwork in order 🤦‍♀️