Knowles Nursery School
How Tapestry helps to embed good early years practice
Knowles Nursery School is a state funded maintained setting in Milton Keynes. Children can start at the nursery the term after they turn 2 years old, and a maximum of 52 children attend each session. We spoke with Headteacher Natalie Fowler, and Part Time Assistant Headteacher Liz Jones about how they use Tapestry to embed their good early years practice.
Supporting parental engagement and communication
Building trust with families is key to the good practice at Knowles. The team use the Observations feature on Tapestry to share photos and videos with parents. This helps to reassure parents, enables them to respond, and adds another tool in the team’s toolbox of ways they can connect with families.
Our relationships with our families are fundamental to their child’s development. Not all our parents and carers have had positive experiences of education themselves and they may be reluctant to engage. Tapestry helps parents to know their child is safe and happy – it helps us to allay those fears when a child is settling in. And when parents look at those photos and videos with their child, it really supports the child’s recall and language development. We encourage parents and carers to ‘like’ and comment on the things we send them, and once they get used to the idea that we love to see photos about their child from them too, it sort of snowballs and we can learn loads about the child. We reinforce this by sharing any photos sent from home when we have group time with the children.
Embedding good early years practice
The staff at Knowles are always looking for ways to enable their good practice, and Tapestry is one of the tools they have to facilitate this. They use Flags to organise their observations – this helps educators to see quickly what a child is showing them they can do. It also enables the leadership team to have an overview of all the areas of learning so they can look at where they may need to adapt their provision. Watching video observations of children helps the team reflect on their approaches.
Tapestry helps us with the nuts and bolts of how everything fits together. We use the flags on our observations, and these mean we can see whether there are any gaps in our provision as a whole as well as what we can do to support an individual child. It helps us embed this good early years practice across the team.
Supporting SEND provision
Knowles have a high proportion of children with learning differences and disabilities and they are developing their use of Tapestry to support them. The team are using Bespoke Frameworks to record children’s individual targets. This allows staff, families and other relevant professionals to see, follow and adapt the unique framework made for each child.
It is so important to us to have inclusive systems in place that work for all our children, especially those who need additional support. We are really excited about this new way of using Tapestry to simply and easily develop individual frameworks for our children with SEND. It will help our team and those who work with us, as well as the children.
They are also exploring Reflections and Page Links to help them complete EHCP and LA funding applications for children, ensuring observations, reports and documents about a child are easy to find and refer to.
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