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.