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Someone in my breakout room recounted a really nice experience they've had this year with a brand new teaching assistant. This person was brand new to education and to the early years. The practitioner in the group spoke so passionately about how it was a great thing they had no prior experience, how them coming in as a blank slate made it really easy to teach them what their high-quality provision looked like.
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We had some really nice answers off the back of this question: A specialist support school has started inviting families, who got referred to them for places but didn't get one, into a new family support group. They said it's been a great source of contact for those parents still looking for a place. Another participant told us how they started a community garden with the children; weaving it into all their learning, letting children take potted vegetables home to take care of, using books that follow the theme have all been amazingly successful.
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This guide will briefly explain how to use the Switch User function on the iOS version of Tapestry. A guide for doing this with the browser version of Tapestry can be found here. This feature is intended for settings where several staff users share a device or devices. It's a quick way to change to a different staff user without logging out and entering your email address and password. This is distinct from the Switch School feature, which is meant for a single user accessing multiple Tapestry accounts on the same device. Once you've logged into the Tapestry app, press 'You' at the bottom (1) of the screen. On the 'You' menu press Switch user (2). You'll then be taken to a list of all the staff on the account. Swipe up and down to navigate through the staff list, and tap on the staff member you want to sign in as. You'll then be presented with the PIN pad for this user where their 4-digit PIN will need to be entered to login. Go back to Main Tutorials Page
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Hello and welcome to our July newsletter If you’re considering using Tapestry Online Learning Journal but aren’t yet a customer, take a look at how it can help you transform learning outcomes for children in EYFS right through to Year 6 - click a link below: I work in an early years setting I work in a school If you’re already a customer, read on for our latest news and updates, including: Organise your finances with Tapestry Invoices New articles and Guides to support your CPD Find out the results of our annual survey How to check your Tapestry renewal information We hope you enjoy catching up on our news, and we always welcome your feedback. Best wishes, The Tapestry Team Organise your finances with Tapestry Invoices We’re excited to announce Tapestry Invoices is now available to everyone at no extra cost. Invoices is the third major update to our management system; it joins Booking and Registers. Set fixed or hourly prices for your sessions, allocate funded hours to children’s schedules and generate invoices at the click of a button - these are just some things you can do right now. For more information on this feature, visit the feature page. New articles and guides to support your CPD We have two new articles, one new guide on the Tapestry website and an external blog post this month: In our first article, teacher Jess Gosling shares how Tapestry can support partnerships with families at an international school. Read the full article here. And we hear from independent education consultant Sejal Payne, who shares ways to ensure children and families with EAL experience high quality transition to the next stage of development. Read the full article here. A Beginner’s Guide to Frobel, has been written by Dr Stella Louis from The Froebel Trust to support childminders, nurseries and schools who are interested in learning about Froebelian principles. Download the free document here. And finally, our SEND Advisor, Stephen Kilgour, has written a blog for the Confederation of School Trusts, about what to consider to create child-centred processes that benefit everyone involved. Find out the results of our annual survey We want to thank everyone who participated in our annual survey - over 1500 early years educators took part. Your responses have been so insightful in sharing experiences of working in the early years in 2023. Check out the survey findings here. The results from the survey were also covered in Nursery World and Early Years Educator. How to check your Tapestry renewal information Do you know when your Tapestry account comes up for renewal? Lots of accounts expire in September, meaning renewal invoices are generated in August and sometimes get missed! If you want to check when your account expires, how many days until your invoice is generated and which email it gets sent to, just click your name in the top right of Tapestry and select Control Panel. On the overview, you will see something similar to this: If, for any reason, you want to settle your invoice earlier than it will be generated automatically, just email customer.service@eyfs.info and we’d be happy to send you an early copy.
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You can watch the full meeting recording here: Key Points from the Meeting Shanti Flynn, Head of Education at Storal, stated the "The biggest barrier to a truly inclusive early education offer is the lack of a national strategy with local authorities making different demands on our providers." Burden of paperwork, inconsistency at the local level, long waiting lists and the funding deficit are also clear barriers. Shanti's recommendations were greater integration at local level, especially for the 2 year progress check to ensure early intervention is done correctly. Secondly, to the review the funding deficit so that children with additional needs are not left with a greater disadvantage. Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation bought some evidence headlines from studies: its only high-quality early education which improves children's outcomes, "disadvantaged" children stand to gain the most from high quality early education - particularly those that start from the age of 2. Josh's priorities are quality, targeting & incentives and more holistic services. High quality provision relies on strengthening the work force. More structured intervention programs that are well-evidenced and help staff develop positive relationships with children. Raising Pupil Premium funding. Looking at different practices in local authorities. Catherine McLeod MBE, Chief Executive of Dingley’s Promise: Catherine shared some recent figures from Early Years Alliance research: 73% settings say number of children with SEND is rising, 92% have had to use their own money to support them. Only 18% of local authorities believe they have enough provision for all the children with SEND in the EY. Catherine outlined the main barriers as too much paperwork, complicated funding systems, recruitment and retention crisis mean staff continuity is an issue for children with SEND, lack of whole setting knowledge and confidence. Catherine's recommendations are more focus on sufficiency for children with SEND, simplify the process of applying for support, more training for staff on inclusive practice and real engagement with families and responding to needs. "Without family trust, you can't have inclusion." Dawn Kiefer and Emma-Jane Hassan, Early Education Leads, Reach Children's Hub: They have been running a listening campaign where they asked early years professions the question "What is putting pressure on you, or those around you, in the early years sector." - Increase demand for SEND support, not feeling valued by wider society, difficulty in recruiting and retaining highly qualified staff, the underpinning reason was the low salary. The next steps is listening to more people in the sector. A living wage is a basic expectation for all EY educators and this will be a focus of the campaign.
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Hello and welcome to our June newsletter If you’re considering using Tapestry Online Learning Journal but aren’t yet a customer, take a look at how it can help you transform learning outcomes for children in EYFS right through to Year 6 - click a link below: · I work in an early years setting · I work in a school If you’re already a customer, read on for our latest news and updates, including: · Free FSF membership for everyone · An upcoming FSF event to support your CPD · A new “Beginner’s Guide To…” available to download · New courses on Tapestry CPD We hope you enjoy catching up on our news, and we always welcome your feedback. Best wishes, The Tapestry Team Free FSF Membership for Everyone You may have heard that the Foundation Stage Forum is 20 years old this year! To celebrate this milestone we’ve decided to make membership to our forum completely free for everyone. For 20 years, The FSF has been a space for like-minded people to discuss current events, pass along advice, share resources or just have a chat! If you want to join this wonderful community of supportive education professionals, make your free account here. An upcoming FSF event to support your CPD Join us for a special online event celebrating 20 years of the Foundation Stage Forum, and the amazing people in the sector. The event will be on Tuesday 27th June, 6-8pm. We invite early years leaders and managers to come together to discuss good practice, challenges, and achievements. To find out more, keep an eye out on the forum and our social posts over the next few weeks. We hope to see you there! A New “Beginner’s Guide To…” Available to Download We are happy to bring you another “Beginner’s Guide To…” completely free and available to download now from our website. Created by Diverse History UK, the “Beginner’s Guide to LGBTQ+ Inclusion” has been designed to support parents, childminders, nurseries and schools in having necessary conversations about LGBTQ+ Inclusion. Download the full guide here. New courses on Tapestry CPD We have two new courses on Tapestry CPD this month. “An Introduction to Safeguarding” is based on the Beginner’s Guide to Safeguarding and consists of two short tasks, two short videos and a wealth of useful information in regards to safeguarding. “Reports: EYFS, KS1 & KS2”: This course explains the statutory reporting requirements for EYFS, KS1 and KS2. It also covers how to complete these reports on Tapestry as well as helpful tips and advice on reporting effectively to parents. Access both courses using the links in the text, or browse our full catalogue of courses from here.
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Hello and welcome to our May newsletter If you’re considering using Tapestry Online Learning Journal but aren’t yet a customer, take a look at how it can help you transform learning outcomes for children in EYFS right through to Year 6 - click a link below: · I work in an early years setting · I work in a school If you’re already a customer, read on for our latest news and updates, including: · New Feature - Custom Report Templates · The Tapestry 2023 Survey – Get your voice heard · New Articles and Guides to support your CPD · Information about Early Years Equality - “We’re here to stay and we’re here for change” We hope you enjoy catching up on our news, and we always welcome your feedback. Best wishes, The Tapestry Team New Feature - Custom Report Templates Last month we made a big improvement to our Reports feature. Along with our pre-made report formats, you can now create and customise your own report format. This is great if you’re using a Bespoke Framework or you just found the premade formats weren’t quite the right fit for your setting. Build your format using our predesigned sections or blank boxes that you can title however you like. It’s really quick and easy and once created, staff will be able to complete reports with it right away. Read more about the Reports feature here. Tapestry 2023 survey – Get your voice heard Our annual survey is now live and is for everyone working in the Early Years. It’s quick to complete and we’d love to get your views on creating a ‘community of practice’, your wellbeing and workload, and the recent government policy announcements for the sector. As in previous years, we use the survey findings in our articles, to support our public relations and marketing, and to help shape the development of Tapestry and the Foundation Stage Forum. This year we have a prize draw and respondents have the chance to win £50 of M&S vouchers. To take part in the 5 minute survey please follow this link. New Articles and Guides to Support your CPD We have three new themes to share with you this month, to support your professional development. Wellbeing: Written by Early Years and wellbeing expert, Kate Moxley, the Beginner's Guide to Educator Wellbeing is designed to help support parents, childminders, nurseries and schools to have necessary conversations about educator wellbeing. Download the free guide here. Metacognition: If you'd like to know a bit more about metacognition, this article by Anoara Mughal, author of the book Think!: Metacognition-powered Primary Teaching, talks us through what it is, as well as strategies for teachers to support their own and their children's metacognition. You can read the article here. Data: Ben Case, from our product support and education teams, has a closer look at how Tapestry takes care of your online data, and shares some important questions to make sure you are confident about how your data is looked after. Read the article here. Early Years Equality – “We’re here to stay and we’re here for change”. We’d like to bring attention to Early Year’s Equality and the work they are doing to try and instigate change for the sector. They have a protest on June 24th outside Downing Street. If you want to get involved with that, and learn more about EYE, visit their website. You can also listen to co-founder Claire Kenyon discussing why we need to value early childhood and the educators within it in a recent podcast episode.
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PLEASE NOTE, DATE FOR THIS MEETING HAS BEEN MOVED "I’m writing to inform you that the next meeting of the APPG for Childcare & Early Education has now been moved to Tuesday 16th May from 4:30pm – 5pm. This is due to a change in Minister Coutinho’s diary and, in order to comply with APPG rules, this requires us to move our meeting and EGM to another date. The Minister has expressed her keenness to attend the meeting and is looking forward to taking questions from our Chair, Steve Brine MP, and the sector on the new date. If you wish to join us on 16th May, please register via the form on our website by clicking here. If you have any questions, please email the secretariat team at: childcareandearlyeducationappg@connectpa.co.uk"
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[Received via email from the APPG organisers] Good afternoon, I’m pleased to extend an invitation from Steve Brine MP to attend the next meeting of the APPG for Childcare & Early Education on Tuesday 25 April from 3:30pm – 4pm via Zoom This special session of the APPG will see the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing, Claire Coutinho MP, sit down with Mr Brine to reflect on the Spring Budget and its implications for the early years. If you wish to join us online you can click here to register via the APPG’s website. Joining details for the Zoom call will be sent out shortly before the meeting. If you have any questions, please email: childcareandearlyeducationappg@connectpa.co.uk. Kind regards, Oliver Champness
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Hello and welcome to our April newsletter If you’re considering using Tapestry Online Learning Journal but aren’t yet a customer, take a look at how it can help you transform learning outcomes for children in EYFS right through to Year 6 - click a link below: I work in an early years setting I work in a school If you’re already a customer, read on for our latest news and updates, including: Nursery Management System – ‘Tapestry Invoices’ coming soon! The benefits of Tapestry for Key Stage 1 & 2 New articles and resources to support your CPD Monitoring Anima Phonics on Tapestry A quick note about the EYFSP We hope you enjoy catching up on our news, and we always welcome your feedback. Best wishes, The Tapestry Team Nursery Management System – ‘Tapestry Invoices’ coming soon! Many of you have told us how much you need a Nursery Management solution to sit alongside our award-winning observation and parental engagement tools. So, we’re very excited to announce the upcoming release of ‘Tapestry Invoices’, which we are aiming to make available to you in June. Invoices will be added to Booking and Registers, which are already available as part of our new Nursery Management System. This will mean Tapestry will have everything in one place, making things easier for you. And because we know money is tight, this additional functionality is available to you at no extra charge. The first version of Tapestry Invoices will offer lots of functionality, and we plan to keep adding to it over the rest of the year. For a taste of what you can expect from Invoices in June, and beyond, check out the Tapestry Invoices page, and get a sneak peak at what it will look like! For updates or further functionality requests, email us. The Benefits of Tapestry for Key Stage 1 & 2 As well as being a great tool for EYFS, Tapestry can transform children’s learning journeys in Key Stage 1 and 2, and nurture strong parental engagement. In particular, Child Login is described as a “game-changer”. Bringing the child to the heart of learning, Child Login motivates and excites children, and supports them in articulating their learning language. Find out how Tapestry is being used in Key Stage 1 and 2 here. Adding your KS1 & 2 pupils is quick and easy: Email us with the number of extra children you wish to add We’ll get back to you with a quote (approx. price £2.50/child) Once you’re upgraded, simply import your KS children via a CSV and you’re good to go! Upgrade your account today! Supporting your CPD with our latest articles and guides We have four new themes to share with you this month, to support your professional development. Inclusion: A member of our education team, Stephen Kilgour’s article ‘What does Inclusion mean to you?’ explores the different facets of inclusion, the art of ‘tuning in’ and the importance of belonging. Read the article here. Transition to KS1: Another member of our education team, Ben Case, has had an article published in Headteacher Update - ‘Reception to year 1: How to support pupil transition’. In it, Ben discusses the importance of getting to know children, the Prime areas of learning, and thinking past ‘GLD’. Read the article here. Disability, STEM and more: We learn from interdisciplinary researcher in space, atmospheric and health sciences, Dr Becca Wilson, who shares her own journey into science and her experience as a disabled person, how to encourage children in STEM, and lots more. Read the article here. Developmental Play: The Beginner’s Guide to Developmental Play is now available to download for free from our website. It has been created by Specialist Paediatric Occupational Therapist, Carly Budd, to support parents, childminders, nurseries and schools in having necessary conversations about Developmental Play. We encourage you to share it widely. Download the guide here. Monitoring Anima Phonics on Tapestry Do you use Anima Phonics at your setting? Good news … you can now upload their Phonics Framework as a Bespoke Framework to your Tapestry account. To start monitoring Anima Phonics on Tapestry, simply contact them and ask them for their Phonics Framework as a CSV. Once you’ve got a copy, upload it by following these steps and you’re good to go! EYFSP on Tapestry After conversations with different Local Authorities, we will no longer be providing a CTF version of the EYFSP export, only a CSV. However, if you require a CTF version, please feel free to contact us on customer.service@eyfs.info
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Good morning, I’m pleased to extend an invitation from Steve Brine MP to attend the next meeting of the APPG for Childcare & Early Education on Tuesday 14 March from 2pm – 3pm online via Zoom. Speakers at the meeting will include: Maria Caulfield MP, Minister for Women Alison Baulos, the Executive Director, The Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago Gabriella Conti, Professor of Economics, UCL Councillor Asher Craig, Deputy Mayor, Children Services, Education and Equalities, Bristol City Council The session will explore investment in our children’s futures, what sustainable funding for early years looks like, and to make the case for the return on investment for early education across a child’s life, as well as the UK economy. Coming the day before the Spring Budget, this will be an exciting discussion on what the future of childcare should look like in the UK. This session will be chaired by the APPG’s Chair Steve Brine MP. If you wish to join us online you can click here to register via the APPG’s website. Joining details for the Zoom call will be sent out shortly before the meeting. If you have any questions, please email: childcareandearlyeducationappg@connectpa.co.uk.
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Hello everyone, welcome to the February newsletter. It's a busy one this month! Android 5.0 We are happy to announce another big update to our Android app! Version 5.0 brings you reference material for staff using the new EYFS, access to the Care Diary for relatives, and the Online Register beta (more on this last one further down). Lots of smaller quality-of-life, security, and performance improvements are also included in this update. It will be slowly rolling out to all Android users over the next week. Please note, this Tapestry app version is the last one where we fully support Android devices running below Android 8. App updates will still be available to those users, but we can no longer address any specific issues for these devices. You can check your Android version within your device’s settings. Online Register (beta) We are pleased to announce another development in our ongoing management system – Online Register (beta) is now available for you all to use. Located within the “Booking” feature, Online Register 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, out, or 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. The reason we are releasing this as a “beta” is because you may see some tweaks over the next few months - most notably the Online Register becoming available on both our apps. As mentioned above, it is available on the most recent version of the Android app, but we are still working on iOS. Editable Comments We also have a little extra enhancement for you. Staff and relatives can now edit their own comments on Observations, Memos, and Reflections - helpful for fixing any typos! The original comment will be recorded in each account’s History section, so managers can still see the original comment if necessary. Mckie Mastery Phonics For any setting who use Mckie Mastery Phonics, there is now a pre-made CSV file you can upload to our Bespoke Frameworks feature if you’d like to start assessing with it on your Tapestry account. You can contact them directly for access to this CSV. To find out how to upload it to your account, please refer to our tutorial. Articles We have two new articles on our info site this month: “Are Observations Still Important in the Early Years?” This article is an amalgamation of information from statutory and non-statutory guidance, quotes from early years experts, and our own reflections on the importance of observations. “A Q&A with Professor Eunice Lumsden.” In this written interview, Professor Eunice Lumsden discusses, among other things, inclusion & diversity; holistic safeguarding; and the qualities of an early years educator. And in case you missed it - “How to Make Assessment More Inclusive.” This article was originally published by TES in October last year but deserves revisiting. Written by our resident SEND advisor Stephen Kilgour, it discusses inclusivity in the context of settings curating their own assessment approaches. Toddlers, Tech and Talk Led by Professor Rosie Flewitt, Manchester Metropolitan University is collaborating with the universities of Lancaster, Queen’s Belfast, Strathclyde and Swansea on a project researching how the home lives of children aged three and under intersect with digital technologies in diverse families in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Through survey research, interviews and innovative participatory research methods, the project will generate new understandings of contemporary home learning environments, and generate guidance for parents and educators on creative and fun ways to make the most of the early learning opportunities offered by digital media. You can read more about the project here. The research team need your help to disseminate the survey, so if you are able to, please share the survey link with parents at your setting. If you are the parent of a child aged 0-36 months, then please also complete the survey yourself 😊. The survey is available in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, French, Gujurati, Polish, Panjabi, Romanian, Ukrainian, Urdu and Welsh. This forum post includes a poster in English which you might display in your setting. If you would like more information about the poster, as well as posters in languages other than English, or if you have any questions about the study, please email Rosie, r.flewitt@mmu.ac.uk And finally … Happy Birthday to the FSF! February 14th 2023 marked the Foundation Stage Forum’s 20th birthday! Despite the myriad changes in the sector over the past 20 years, the Forum remains the place it always was - a space for the supportive network of education professionals to discuss any and all things: to help, to share and to connect. To mark the occasion, we have opened a new forum thread for you to come and share your most positive experiences working with children over the past 20 years. We are also planning some exciting changes to the FSF in the future, so watch this space.
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Podcast episode - Reading for Pleasure
JackTapestrySupport replied to Jules's topic in Key Stage 1 & 2
This was such a great episode to be part of and always a pleasure to talk to Kiran. Really made me reflect on my previous teaching of reading. If anyone else enjoys this episode, Jules and I have talked to Kiran before about Alternative Fairy Tales. -
Happy birthday FSF! What a milestone for a fantastic resource. I have many happy memories from my teaching time, but I think my favourite was my first class assembly. The class and I reimagined the old classic, Oliver Twist. From the script writing to costume design, the whole process was a fantastic journey of learning, fun and hard work. Performing this masterpiece to the parents was nerve-wracking, and I wasn't even the one on stage. But the hard work paid off when I saw elated parents and carers giving hugs of congratulations to their children after the show. And one parent shook my hand and said "I must have seen about 15 of these class assemblies so far, and this one was my favourite." Made it all worth it.
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January Newsletter Hello everyone and a Happy New Year from all of us at Tapestry. New Resources and Courses We have two new additions to our growing suite of “Beginner’s Guides” and a new CPD course this month. The Beginner's Guide to Developmental Trauma: this document has been created by Child and Adolescent Counsellor Simmone Boyce to support childminders, nurseries and schools in understanding and supporting developmental trauma. The Beginner's Guide to Safeguarding: this document has been created by Safeguarding expert, speaker, and author Ann Marie Christian to support childminders, nurseries and schools in having necessary conversations about safeguarding. The Beginner's Guide to Developmental Trauma has also been adapted into a CPD course available for you via Tapestry CPD. New Articles We also have a new article on our info site this month. “The Importance of Parental Engagement” by Jamel C Campbell, is an insightful reflection on parent partnerships in the early years through the lens of a new father. Bespoke Frameworks Have you used our Bespoke Frameworks feature yet? It's perfect for adding assessments to observations in areas that you would like to monitor alongside your usual processes. Many schools have already added frameworks linked to approaches such as Launchpad for Literacy. Other schools have added criteria from phonics schemes or RE curriculums. If you use a specific program or scheme, why not contact your provider to let them know about Bespoke Frameworks on Tapestry - they could then create a CSV file that their users could easily upload to Tapestry. Feel free to use our example message: 'As Tapestry users we would like to upload your assessments to use alongside our regular monitoring. The Bespoke Framework feature allows us to upload a CSV file containing assessment information that we can then add to our observations. This tutorial explains the process of creating a CSV file which you could then share with your customers (only those users in possession of the file would have access). For more information, you can contact the Tapestry team here: customer.service@eyfs.info'. Bespoke thoroughness screen Speaking of the Bespoke Frameworks feature, we are pleased to announce that the first monitoring screen compatible with your bespoke frameworks is now available. This is a “Thoroughness” screen and, as with most of our other screens, it has an “individual” and “group” view. This screen will be helpful if you need to see things like the number of times a certain statement has been used in Observations; which children in your class have observations in a certain area; or if there any gaps in your provision. You can access the Bespoke thoroughness screen via the browser version of Tapestry. Just click Tracking > Bespoke Frameworks. If you would like more information on how this screen works, check out the tutorial Access the FSF as a Tapestry Member Did you know, as a Tapestry member you also have membership to our Forum? The Foundation Stage Forum is a place for the community of education professionals to talk and support each other. It also houses hundreds of helpful resources and is updated regularly with new articles and podcasts. You can access the forum here and to sign in, simply click “sign in” at the top right and then “Sign in with Tapestry” We hope to see you there! iOS Support Update As mentioned in previous newsletters, iOS 9 (along with versions up to 15) will no longer be supported on the app with the next release. We are also ending formal support for iOS 9 for the browser. For more information about this, please see our 'Which device to use” forum post. Price Increase From March 2023 our prices will be increasing. More information on this, along with the revised pricing structure can be found on this forum post. BETT Awards We are so delighted that Tapestry has been shortlisted for two categories in the 2023 BETT Awards: Early Years Digital Product or Service, and Assessment, Planning and progress Monitoring. This is the first time we have entered these awards, and it is especially exciting to be a finalist not long after we celebrated 10 years of Tapestry. Tapestry has also been shortlisted for the Business Cloud EdTech 50 Ranking - for a selection of innovative firms creating tech for education and workplace development. This is the second year running that we've reached the shortlist. We now eagerly await the results for this ranking and want to thank anyone who voted for us. Look out for upcoming announcements about this on our socials.
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APPG for Early Childcare and Early Education – Meeting on the 24.1.23 Meeting Brief: The session will celebrate Childcare and Early Education Week 2023, the theme of which is ‘Fund Early Years, Fund their Future’. The discussion will look to celebrate the hard work of early years practitioners whilst also looking at sustainable funding options to ensure that all children can receive the best quality early years education. This meeting will be chaired by Steve Brine MP and will hear from the following speakers: · Purnima Tanuku OBE, Chief Executive of the National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA) · Julie Hyde, Director of External and Regulatory Affairs at NCFE · Catherine McLeod MBE, Chief Executive of Dingley's Promise · Cheryl Hadland, Founder and Managing Director of Tops Day Nurseries, Aspire Training Team and Hadland Care Group Steve Brine: Began by introducing the Childcare and Early Education week. He talked about the good coverage the week has had in Nursery World and some early involvement from councils. He then said a few words about the sector and current issues: “Early years clearly is a vital parts of a child’s education” “the UK has the second lowest investment from government but the highest parental support […] it can’t continue to run on nothing” He then introduced our speakers. Purnima Tanuku OBE: Started by introducing the NDNA’s newest campaign about raising the awareness of the importance of Early years – they have over 80,000 supporters as of writing. She then showed a short campaign video featuring a number of early years professionals speaking candidly about what they do and why they do it. You can watch that video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg2qAQ7mMMI And you can read more about the NDNA’s campaign, and get involved here: https://ndna.org.uk/firstfiveyearscount/ Purnima’s other points included: The vast majority of childcare, employed child care educators, and children are in the PVI sector. The funding compared to schools is very minimal. There needs to be a full independent review of the entire sector. Julie Hyde: Started by explaining how the NCFE supports the education and qualification of practitioners. You can visit there website here: https://www.ncfe.org.uk/ Julie explained there’s been an increase over the last three years of practitioners gaining qualifications in this sector, despite the obvious recruitment and retention issue. She concluded it’s not a lack of people qualifying, it’s retaining those qualified people that is the real issue. Julie’s other points included: “We need to keep ensuring we are banging the drum for this fantastic sector” Explained how retention is key for a sustainable workforce. Part is funding related, and part is views on aspirations. Making sure EY professionals are recognised for their hard work is paramount in tackline retention A revised workforce strategy is really key. The sector needs to be engaged with in order to do this. Catherine McLeod MBE: Started by exemplifying these issues have a more concentrated effect on children with SEND. “When there is an issue with sufficiency, its often the children with SEND that get turned away first” Settings can’t support SEND children as well anymore because of resource issues. Even settings who have done this very well in the past now can’t accept SEND children because of funding, staffing etc. Reflecting on Julie’s previous point: Lots of people have a passion for working in the EY, but they simply can’t because the pay does not support them or their families. Cheryl Hadland: Started with exemplifying the staff turnover issue. Cheryl explained personal experience about not being able to open new nursery because she can’t find the staff. Cheryl’s other points included: The pay scales do not compete with many other sectors, not just in education Business rates are making it more and more difficult for nursery owners to pay staff more “our funding is woefully inadequate” The funding calculation was too low to begin with and hasn’t increased with inflation/wage increases enough “We are on our knees […] please can we have some help” “double funding, stop the business rates” The rate per child going up is the Key People are leaving because of increased stress and demands for staff Striking often isn’t an option because the nursery’s will just go bust and have to close their doors Q&A: Participant: Explained the very real concern that parents will soon not be able to find child care which will take millions of men and women away from the workplace. Participant: The government is putting more money in, but more and more settings are closing. Why do we finish EY at 5, it should be 7. In other countries it’s 7 and its free. Until government agree Early Years are the most important years there will be no sector left. Participant: the change from Early Education to “free child care” was the beginning of the end. You can watch the full and recorded meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZbauJOgNw If you ever want to join an APPG meeting, please email childcareandearlyeducationappg@connectpa.co.uk
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Hi, everyone. An early newsletter this month to try and reach you before the holiday period, with just a few things to announce. New Articles We have a new article on the Tapestry site this month. "When I think about the importance of conversations” by Jamel C Campbell recounts his own important experiences with conversation and discusses the integral part conversations play within the Early Years, as well as reflecting on the experience of having conversations to create his recently published book, co-authored with Sonia Mainstone-Cotton. Resources to Support your CPD As we come to the end of another year, we thought it would be helpful to give you a round-up of some of the resources we’ve been adding to throughout the year. Tapestry CPD Our very own CPD area with a range of Tapestry and Education focussed courses. All the current courses are free and accessible to anyone via this link. However, to save course progression and (in the case of some courses) receive a completion certificate, you can log into the CPD site using your Tapestry sign in. The FSF and Tapestry Podcast The Foundation Stage Forum (FSF) and Tapestry podcast release bi-monthly episodes. There’s over 130 episodes in the back catalogue so far on a variety of education topics from a diverse range of knowledgeable and experienced guests. You can listen to all the existing episodes, and subscribe for future releases, here. Tapestry Articles As mentioned above in our New Articles announcement - we publish at least one new article a month on Tapestry.info. If you want to browse the articles you can do so from here and keep an eye on our socials for new articles being announced. The Infographics Library Last but not least, Tapestry.info is also home to our Infographics library where you can find Tapestry guides, EYFS activity ideas and many others – all in a more visual format. Notification Timings One quality-of-life improvement we have made this month is changing the time your “daily” and “weekly” email notifications from Tapestry get delivered to you. Previously, these email notifications could get to some users in the early hours of the morning. We have now changed that so they can only arrive between 3:30pm and 8:30pm GMT. The “Immediate” and “Internal” notification preferences are unchanged. Product Support Lastly, our Product Support team will be working Monday to Friday as usual (excluding bank holidays) throughout the holiday period so if you need to contact them about anything just email customer.service@eyfs.info
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Hi everyone. We hope you’ve had a lovely November. Care Diary on Android This Month we are very excited to announce our first iteration of the Care Diary on the app. The Care Diary is now available to all staff who use the most recent version of the Tapestry Android or Amazon Fire app. You will now be able 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. If you are an iOS user or a relative, app versions of the Care Diary are still actively being worked on for you. If you would like to be notified via email when these are available, please email our customer service team on customer.service@eyfs.info and they will be happy to keep you up to date. New articles We have a new article on the Tapestry site this month: "Supporting parents and carers of children with EAL” by Sejal Payne. In this article Sejal explores the difference between involvement and engagement, discusses the numerous barriers that parents and carers could face and provides some experience-backed strategies to help support you and your community's families. Printed Register Enhancements We’ve made some improvements to the printed register within the Booking feature. In response to lots of great feedback from our users, you can now: generate weekly registers as well as daily ones; include specific times of the session(s) children are booked in for; include children’s date of birth, booking notes (for daily registers only) and additional blank rows for unexpected children; and finally, some additional options to how you sort the children on the list and some additional “layout options” have been added. Hopefully these changes mean you can get the most out of the printed registers on Tapestry! Memos for Enrolling Children One small “quality of life” improvement we have made is you can now use the Memos feature with Enrolling children. This should help make and maintain those initial links with parents via Tapestry before you are ready to fully activate the new children. New Infographic There’s a new addition to our growing infographic library. “Using Tapestry to Support Your Processes in Preparation for Ofsted” is written to help you reflect on how you are using Tapestry. Hopefully it will help to guide you in using Tapestry in the most effective way on a day-to-day basis, but especially when preparing for a visit! New CPD Course The popular “The First Year” course on Tapestry CPD has been updated with its third and final module. Module 3 focusses on Social and Emotional Development: learn how babies develop socially and emotionally, and what to typically expect for a new-born and at months one, three, six, nine and twelve. During this module you can expect 3 tasks, a suggested article and a short quiz to finish. Successful completion also gets you a certificate! This course has been made in collaboration with Siren Films and Layton Sixth Form College. You can access this course, and others, by clicking “CPD” in the top task bar of your Tapestry account or via this link.
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Hi, everyone! Tapestry Turns 10! This month marks Tapestry’s tenth birthday. It's an opportunity for us to thank everyone in the education sector for their dedication to children, families and colleagues in their communities. You keep us inspired. To celebrate, over on our Twitter we’ve been looking back at just some of the knowledgeable people we’ve been lucky enough to connect with over the years, and Jules from our Education Team has written this article: 10 Reflections Over 10 Years. Early Years Wellbeing Week In case you missed it in our last newsletter, we were proud endorsers of Early Years Wellbeing Week earlier this month. The week is designed to highlight the need for awareness about mental health in the sector, and to support settings to embed mental health literacy in their practice with colleagues and their communities. All the resources and information can still be accessed – go here for more. Feature Focus – Booking This month’s Feature Focus is “Booking” It’s Tapestry's first release in our commitment to developing a nursery management system. Here’s what you can do with Booking right now: · Add and create custom rooms and sessions, and easily book children in. · Keep an eye on room occupancy and planned and unplanned child absences, to raise concerns and manage ratios. · Establish staff ratios for each room, to guarantee you always have the minimum staff required. · Set your opening hours and closures to manage your setting, children, and staff. · Print out daily and weekly registers for each room. As with all features, Booking is included for free on every Tapestry subscription and you can find out more about it here. Tapestry Tip You can assign multiple children to the same relative and multiple relatives to the same child! If you have a parent with more than one child, or if mum, dad, grandma and grandad all want to be linked to one child, that process is really simple. Just make sure everyone has their own log in and then link each relative to the correct child(ren) by following the steps in this tutorial. Launchpad for Literacy As many of you may know, you can upload your own Bespoke Frameworks to Tapestry using a CSV file. Well, those of you who use Launchpad For Literacy will be please to know the CSV file has already been made for you! To get a copy, just email Kirstie on kirstie.page@launchpadforliteracy.co.uk and upload to your Tapestry account to get started. Articles This month you might want to check out a couple of articles written by members of our education team that have been published in sector media. Ben’s article ‘Falling in love with observations all over again’ for Nursery World, reflects on rethinking observations - for the good of the child rather than the spreadsheet. Meanwhile, Stephen discusses developing inclusive assessment approaches in an article for TES.
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Hi Everyone. We hope those of you starting a new academic year have had a really positive beginning. We have lots of news and announcements this month so read on for more details. Booking 2.1 This month we’ve made some further improvements to our newly released Booking feature. We've added more details to the way you set up your Rooms. You can now specify a minimum and maximum age for the children in that room. And you can set a maximum capacity for the room along with a staff ratio. This change then feeds into your Daily and Weekly booking screens where you can see how many staff are required for specific periods of time and whether you’ve hit your maximum capacity for children booked into a room. The last change is the addition of a calendar view within each child’s Dashboard which shows all the bookings, holidays and absences. You can view this as a weekly calendar or a monthly calendar. “Newsletter Children” Some Tapestry users have created “Newsletter children” on their accounts, which involves adding a fake child and attaching all relatives to this child, for the purpose of sending out news/updates to all relatives at once. This method is much less common now we have the Memos feature, which was specifically designed for sending news/updates to families. However, we do still see a few settings with these fake newsletter children. The inherent problem with this method is because all relatives are attached to this child, any relative can upload something from their own account, accidentally tag the newsletter child in the observation and then all other relatives would be able to see this observation. As you can imagine, this sometimes ends up with data protection issues if the relative uploading the observation includes any personal information only intended for the teacher. If you do have one of these ‘newsletter children’ on your account, we recommend you delete them and switch over to using the Memos feature. New CPD Courses We have two new CPD courses available right now on Tapestry CPD. “Setting up relatives on Tapestry” and “' Making observations with Tapestry” The 'Making Observations with Tapestry' CPD course goes beyond writing notes, attaching media and linking children, and looks at tips and tricks for creating observations to support and develop your provision. https://cpd.tapestry.info/course/view.php?id=24 Aimed at Managers, 'Setting Up Relatives on Tapestry not only goes through the basics of adding new relatives individually and in bulk, it also looks at the most common issues they can run into when activating their accounts and logging in to Tapestry, and helps you to identify and resolve these swiftly. https://cpd.tapestry.info/course/view.php?id=25 Your Tapestry Account Name If your setting has changed its name, a manager can update the account name by going to Control Panel > Settings > Your Setting. New Articles We have a new article on our info site this month. “Looking Back, Looking Forwards” by David Wright is not only a reflective piece on his varied experiences over a long career, but also a closer look at how the Early Years sector has changed and his hopes for its future. And do take a look at an article published in The Headteacher, written by Anya from our Education Team. It’s called “Scaffolding the development of your TAs”, and in it Anya shares insights from her own experience as a TA. You can read it in full here. Early Years Wellbeing Week We encourage everyone to visit the Early Years Wellbeing Week website to find out more about the week itself, which this year runs from 10th to 16th October, and to find supportive resources and information: Kate writes: “There is increasing evidence that the prevention of mental ill health is needed for early years educators. We believe we can all play our part in raising awareness and increasing mental health literacy by promoting preventative wellbeing measures and addressing mental health stigma and discrimination.” Tapestry is proud to be an endorser of Early Years Wellbeing Week. Keep an eye out for an upcoming FSF and Tapestry podcast with Stephen, Jules and Kate Moxley.
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Hello everyone. We hope you’ve managed to stay cool this August! We have a few things to tell you about this month so read on for more info. Documents for Specific People We have released an update to the Documents feature. As requested, you can now upload documents for specific relatives. Whereas as before you could choose to upload a document for staff or ALL the relatives on your account, you can now tag specific children when uploading a document, so only the linked relatives of those children have access to it. When you next go to upload a document, you will see the extra choice here: Teach Primary Awards Finalist! We are so excited that Tapestry’s Cherry Garden Branch Maps have been shortlisted for the Teach Primary Awards 2022] for the ‘SEN’ category. Developed by the Ofsted Outstanding specialist school Cherry Garden, the Cherry Garden Branch Maps are a unique and flexible framework to monitor progress for children with learning differences and disabilities. The unique interactive orchard provides the opportunity to celebrate progress and engage children and families with their learning. Tapestry is the exclusive online home of the Cherry Garden Framework, and, like all our other features, is included for free in all subscriptions – you just need to enable the framework from your control panel to get started! September and Product Support As September is our busiest time of year, responses from our customer service team may take slightly longer than usual - we all really appreciate your patience. Also, our training sessions are now on hold. They will resume on the 17th of October so if you are interested in a bespoke training session after this date then please do get in touch. Thank you! Useful Resources for the Beginning of a new Academic Year. Starting a new academic year is always busy so we have compiled a few resources to make the things you need to do on Tapestry as smooth and as quick as possible. Firstly, this tutorial: How to Prepare Your Tapestry Account for the Next Academic Year covers managing multiple packages, downloading important data, transferring children, deleting previous users, and adding new users, among other helpful tips. This “To Do” list also covers some similar topics and includes links to other helpful tutorials. We also have a CPD course all about starting a new year if you wanted something a bit more hands-on! We hope you have a fantastic September!
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Hi, everyone What Does Tapestry Do? We have released a new video on our YouTube channel. It’s a whistle-stop tour of Tapestry and covers all the main features. This video is helpful for those thinking about joining Tapestry and it might also reveal some features you aren’t using yet and may like to try. New Articles We have a new article on our website this “Empowering Children Through Listening with Love" by Tamsin Grimmer explores the importance of truly listening to children, and how this can offer them agency and empower them in their learning. You can read the full article here. Tapestry Tip! As the end of the academic year is upon us, many of you are now generating journals for relatives and deleting children from your Tapestry account. Did you know, as soon as you have your PDF’s queued up and ready to download, you can delete the child’s profile. This will immediately create room on your account so you can begin to add your new children, or activate your enrolling children. Infographics. Speaking of the end of the academic year, it might be a good time to check out our infographics library. We have a few resources there which are especially useful this time of year such as our “End of Year To Do List” series. You can see them all here: We also have a CPD course (available for free via Tapestry CPD) titled “Starting a New Academic Year on Tapestry” which is great for more in-depth instruction on getting everything set up correctly. That’s it for July! Talk to you all again next month.
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Hi everyone New Feature – Booking We have another exciting announcement this month; The first release of our Management System has gone live! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wn10WHM6Os Release 1, available to you all right now, focuses on booking and printable registers. Future releases will include further occupancy planning, billing and invoicing, and digital registers. Read more about our Booking feature here and if you want to get started right away, you can find our tutorials here. Bespoke Frameworks Just in case you missed our announcement last month, Bespoke Frameworks went live on Tapestry! Bespoke Frameworks allows you to add your own frameworks to Tapestry and use them within Observations. The Feature page will tell you more about it, and if you want to get started using Bespoke Frameworks, please find the tutorials here. This video also gives you a quick introduction to what this feature looks like and how it works. A Beginner’s Guide to Anti-Racism If you are looking for support to start necessary conversations at your setting about Anti-racist practice, A Beginner’s Guide to Anti-racism written by Early Years anti-racist trainer and consultant Liz Pemberton, is a free resource to help you. You can read more about Liz, and download a free copy of the Beginner's Guide to Anti-Racism on our website. Tapestry CPD We have another CPD course available. Module 2 of 'The First Year', written in collaboration with Siren Films and Leyton Sixth Form College, is available now. You can learn how babies develop key physical skills, such as reflex walking movements and rolling over. Find this, and Module 1 - Communication and Connection here. Becoming an Ocean Superhero! Tapestry HQ hosted some special guests last month. Representatives from the Marine Conservation Society and the Life Recreation ReMEDIES project put on an event exemplifying, among other things, the importance of sea grass. This quote from their website may be of interest to some of you: “As partners in the ReMEDIES project, The Ocean Conservation Trust and Marine Conservation Society are working with schools to show children the wonders of the underwater world. Through an outreach programme as well as downloadable lesson plans and virtual content, we aim to bring the amazing seabed habitats into your classroom.” You can read more about becoming Ocean Superheroes and download their fantastic resources from here. New Articles We have a new article on the Tapestry site this month. Author, Autism & ADHD Specialist, Adaptive Cognitive Behaviour Therapist & Speaker, Suzy Rowland, has written a piece exploring the importance of emotional support and trauma informed approaches and how this impacts children’s behaviour. You can read Little People, BIG Emotions here. EYE Guide to… In association with Early Years Educator (EYE), Tapestry has created a resource titled Communication and Connection: creating and maintaining effective relationships in the EYFS. Written by the education team here at Tapestry, the guide is designed to be both reassuring, and a celebration of Early Years settings and educators. Key content includes: · working in partnership with families. · Monitoring children’s learning and development. · Building your curriculum and adapting your provision. · Supporting your team and their professional learning. The hardcopy guide will be going out in EYE’s July edition, but you can also download the full guide here. In addition, Tapestry Education Team member and content editor, Jules, has written an accompanying blog post, explaining in more detail some of our thinking behind what is written in the guide. You can read the blog post here. Are Your Details Correct? This time of year is an excellent time to make sure your invoicing details are up to date. A lot of accounts come up for renewal around September so it’s important to check your invoice is going to be sent to the right person and it includes the right details before it’s generated. If you are a manager on Tapestry, you can see detailed information about your account by going to Control Panel: As you can see, this overview page shows your subscription size, expiry date and invoicing address. If any of these things need updating please contact us on customer.service@eyfs.info. Quoting your most recent invoice number in your email will ensure your query can be dealt with as quickly as possible. Tapestry Survey Thank you to everyone who completed the Tapestry 2022 survey. The findings are now available on our website. The main messages are: · the value of CPD needs closer attention to ensure educators receive relevant training and that they have the opportunity to follow through within their setting or school. · the majority of respondents feel more confident using technology now than before the pandemic, but understanding the impact of it’s use on teaching and learning is more challenging. · Encouraging children to think and talk about their learning happens in a variety of ways within settings and schools, with two fifths using video to prompt discussions with children. And congratulations to Tricia Hawkes, who is the winner of the prize draw from the Tapestry survey – and a £50 M&S voucher!
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Hi, Stephen. Thanks for getting in touch. That's not something that's currently possible, but I can see how having flag sets only appearing for specific children of your choosing could be useful. Especially for your situation. I am gong to pass your idea along to our development team to discuss and I will keep you updated if anything changes! Thanks and let me know if you have any other questions :)
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Feature Release: Bespoke Frameworks Our newest feature release is one we’ve all been looking forward to. Bespoke Frameworks allows you to add your own frameworks to Tapestry and use them within Observations. The Feature page will tell you more about it, and if you want to get started using Bespoke Frameworks, please find the tutorials here. This video also gives you a quick introduction to what this feature looks like and how it works. New CPD Course Available There's a new Tapestry CPD course available for free! Written by Tapestry's education advisors and former teachers Ben and Jules, 'Communication in a Child's Fifth Year' is designed to support your reflective practice in this area of development, for new and existing Reception teachers and support staff. New 2-year-check Guidance For those of you who do your two-year checks on Tapestry, you may well be aware that new guidance was released earlier this month – you can read the new guidance here. The two-year check report format on Tapestry remains relevant and available for you to use if you wish. We also published an interesting article last year: “An Interview with Fliss James, the project lead of ‘What to expect in the Early Years Foundation Stage: a guide for parents.’” That guide for parents is something mentioned a few times in the new two-year check guidance and continues to be an excellent resource to share with your relatives. You can download the full document here. Articles We have two new articles this month. "7 Things You Didn’t Know About Tapestry”, is worth a read if you think you could be doing more with your Tapestry account. It’s 7 things I think are really helpful about Tapestry that sometimes fly under the radar. “How you can use Tapestry journals to support your provision”, written by Ben, helps you to get the best use out of some of the existing Tapestry features. Ben discusses Observations, Flags, Reflections and Child Login. A Message for Finance If you are planning on paying an upcoming or pending invoice by BACS, please note that the processing of BACs payments is not automated so we do ask that you allow 5 to 7 working days for the payment to be processed. To ensure your payment is assigned to your invoice as quickly and efficiently as possible, please make sure you do the following: · Include your invoice number in the payment reference. This is vitally important if your setting has a name likely to be duplicated by another setting such as ‘St Josephs’ etc. · Send a remittance advice to bacs@eyfs.info confirming the amount being sent and your invoice number. This is especially vital if your payment is coming from an academy trust where your setting name or invoice number will not appear in the payment reference. You can also notify us that a payment has been sent from within your Tapestry account by clicking on the ‘contact us’ link. · Ensure your remittance advice refers to the organisation making the payment on your behalf, such as a local authority or academy trust. · Finally, a reminder that we moved banks in October 2019 to HSBC (Account name The Foundation Stage Forum Ltd - sort code 40 18 22 - Account number 42445565). Payments made to our old Lloyds bank account will not be processed. If after 7 days your invoice has not been marked paid, please do contact us as it might be that we have not received sufficient information to process monies received or that funds have not reached us. All payment queries can be directed to customer.service@eyfs.info. Android Support We will be dropping support for Android version 4.4. This means if your Android device is running Android 4.4 you will no longer be able to update your app. You can still use your Tapestry app on the version you currently have but in order to upgrade the app any further you will need your device to run a version of Android above 4.4. Reflection Toolkit This month also sees the release of the Reflection Toolkit, a resource created by the Education team at the Foundation Stage Forum and the Early Years Inclusion and Portage team at Doncaster Council. The Toolkit encourages educators to reflect on their provision and adjustments they can make to it to support children with learning differences and disabilities. You can read more about it, and download a free copy of the Reflection Toolkit, here. Infographics We have a new Tapestry Infographic this month. This one explains a bit more about the ELGs and the EYFSP on Tapestry including the difference between the flags and the assessment frameworks. Very useful for this time of year! You can download that infographic here. Tapestry Survey This is just another reminder that our Tapestry Survey is still live so if you haven’t had a chance to fill it out (and be entered into the prize draw) then you can do so from this link. Thank you!