John Coleman Rachael Flesher

Senior Her Majesty’s Inspector Her Majesty’s Inspector

September 2015

Early Years Doncaster-challenges, support and opportunities

North East Yorkshire and Humberside

1

Early years annual report 2015

Key messages

More than 80% of early years provision is now good or outstanding.

Practitioners understand they are there to teach and not just provide childcare.

Big jump in the proportion of children reaching a good level of development.

However the gap between the most disadvantaged children and the rest is not narrowing.

Around 113,000 two-year-olds were eligible for 15 hours of free early education but did not take up their place (42%).

Key messages

Call upon health visitors to promote take-up.

Schools must do more to work with early years providers and support transitions.

Where schools provide places for two-year-olds they are disproportionately from better off families.

Teaching and play – A balancing act?

Early years providers we visited:

Had a clear focus on developing children’s communication, language and vocabulary

Higher levels of adult interaction with disadvantaged children

Ensure accurate assessments of what a child can do

Collaborative working with children’s centres and schools, particularly when shared sites and other early years providers.

Getting to good

Seminar for

early years providers

Gill Bishop HMI and Rachael Flesher HMI

Summer 2014

Getting to good for early years providers

Teaching and learning

A simple definition

Put simply: teaching is the many different ways in which adults help young children learn.

Getting to good in the early years

Getting to good in the early years

• Do the children in your setting have enough

high quality experiences that will enrich their communication skills?

• Do they have enough high quality interactions with adults who provide a good role model?

• Do all staff challenge children enough?

• Is the quality consistent between adults?

• How well are adults working with parents to help them support their child’s learning?

Some questions to ask about teaching

Getting to good in the early years

How do you know?

Is the quality of teaching and learning good and better in your settings?

Assessment

Assessment

Integral to teaching is assessment that:

identifies what children know, understand and can do

takes account of children’s interests and dispositions to learning (characteristics of effective learning)

is used to plan children’s next steps in learning and to monitor their progress.

Getting to good in the early years 18

Good practice – essential ingredients

• involving parents • establishing starting points • clear record keeping • simple systems that everyone

understands and uses consistently

• information is used for planning daily activities

• information is pulled together to give an overview of groups and cohorts as well as individuals.

Getting to good in the early years 18

Getting to good in the early years

• How well do we take account of information from parents and other settings when children join us?

• Is our assessment information accurate?

• How well are we capturing a picture of children's learning and development at key points and over time?

• How well are we using the information and what will we change as a result?

• How well are we moderating our judgements?

Questions to ask yourself about assessment

Leadership and management

Good practice survey: ‘Getting it right first time’

Strong early years leaders:

have a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve; they are absolutely determined to ‘get it right first time’

have high expectations of children and adults alike

are highly qualified and experienced, with very good EYFS knowledge

know exactly what good and better teaching looks like, how children learn best

know what they need to do to bring about improvement, leading by example

expect & encourage staff to be fully involved and move at the right pace

are not afraid to challenge poor performance and develop a well-qualified team

understand the correlation between highly qualified staff & the quality of provision

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/getting-it-right-first-time-achieving-and-maintaining-high-quality-early-years-provision

Getting to good in the early years

Approaches used for raising performance in settings that have made the journey to good Performance management used to build the capacity for consistent

and sustained improvement.

Coaching and mentoring procedures were established.

Programmes of peer working were judged to be highly effective.

Tailored programmes of professional development helped to motivate staff.

Staff meetings were remodelled to focus on teaching and learning.

A firm approach to recruitment and induction was adopted and only good or outstanding candidates were considered.

Staff were provided with the opportunity to take external qualifications.

Getting to good in the early years

Getting to good in the early years

Improving teaching and learning

How do you monitor the quality of teaching and learning in the early years? How often do you do it?

How do you use what you find out to set individual performance targets for all staff?

How do you support them to achieve the targets through training?

Getting to good in the early years

• have clear starting points

• set out what you want to improve and by when

• show what action will be taken, who will take it and when they will take it

• show who will check that things are happening as planned

• involve everyone at the school.

Effective planning for improvement is likely to:

Activity 7: Review your own action plan

Success criteria and measurable objectives that ensure good practice (at least) and which staff can be held accountable for.

Setting a reasonable and appropriate timescale, given your capacity.

Having actions in a sequence that reflects the reality of the school.

Having clear milestones by which to monitor progress.

Identifying who has the skills and is accountable for delivering, monitoring and evaluating – and shares out the responsibilities.

Clearly indicating roles of external agencies, governors and others.

Do these features of strong action planning appear in your plan?

Getting to good in the early years

Regional headlines

Early Years: the North East is well behind the rest of the country

Left behind at the start: by age 5 the weakest fifth of pupils in NEYH are already well behind even similar pupils nationally