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Supporting children's development
Supporting children's development

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

Structure of the course

This course has five sections, with each section focusing on a particular aspect of supporting children’s development.

  1. Developing and managing relationships [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]   looks at the stages of child development through the use of case studies and an introduction to child development theory. It considers the roles of family, as well as support workers, in relation to this development.
  2. Encouraging reading considers how children learn to read and develop literacy skills from when they are babies to secondary school.
  3. Behavioural management looks at possible causes of children and young people’s behaviour and some common strategies for managing behaviour. 
  4. Special needs looks at what we mean by special educational needs and disability (SEND) and the role of teaching assistants in supporting children with SEND.
  5. Professional development plan (PDP) looks at the importance of reflecting on your own practice and how drawing up a PDP can help you to think about your personal and career development.

Together they amount to approximately 15 hours of study time. Each section has a mixture of reading, video clips, activities and quizzes that will help you to engage with the course content.

A further section, Taking my learning further, will enable you to reflect upon what you have learned within this course. It also directs you to relevant websites and resources, which further relate to the development of your learning and career prospects.

Once you have studied a section, you will be asked to complete a short online quiz of no more than five questions per section. This helps to test and embed your learning.

Supporting children’s development is designed to allow you to dip in and out of the resources, so that you can study in small chunks to fit around your work and life commitments. If you choose to complete all sections of Supporting children’s development and collect the badge, you can download a statement of participation that recognises your achievement. You may find this useful to show your employer as evidence of your learning. For more information on how to obtain your badge, read What is a badge?

Navigating the website

To find your way around this course, you simply click on the links. The home page has links to all the sections, quizzes and relevant resources. When you are in a section, the left-hand menu has links to that section’s topics and its associated quiz. The menu also has links to the other sections of Supporting children’s development and to the resources section.

If you feel unsure, practise hovering your mouse over a link in the menu and clicking on it. This is the easiest way to move from page to page. You can also click on the ‘Next: … ’ link at the end of each page of text. Don’t worry about breaking a link or damaging the web page – you won’t. Have a go as soon as you can before you begin your study.