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.