Extension activity
Extension activity – Assessing your environment
There is a range of online resources to help you assess or audit your physical environment, or reflect on how you work together as a team. (These are listed below this activity.)
You might find it helps to start with the following table, which comes from How good is our early learning and childcare (p. 13). This table helps you assess how well you provide personalised support. Note that the guidance doesn’t tell you how to achieve highly effective practice – that is up to you.
| Features of highly effective practice | Challenge questions |
|---|---|
Self-evaluation is at the heart of everything that we do in our setting. All of our practitioners are actively engaged in continuously evaluating and improving our setting. The views of children, parents/carers and families are effectively used to improve the life and work of the setting. Everyone involved with the setting’s community has a shared understanding of its strengths and improvement needs. Parents/carers have regular opportunities to support improvement by participating in a range of formal and informal activities. All practitioners have a clear focus on monitoring and evaluating the quality of children’s learning and on tracking their progress and achievements. They work effectively as a team. There is a strong ethos of improvement through sharing practice, and through peer support and challenge. Professional learning activities for all practitioners are clearly linked to the results of self-evaluation and identified areas for improvement. Our practitioners are inward-, outward- and forward-looking in their evaluation and improvement activities. Our learning and developments are informed by making very effective use of the data we get from our learning community, as well as up-to-date research from Scotland and beyond. Our practitioners have high aspirations and expectations for all children and families. We use a well-informed range of approaches to assess children’s progress across their learning. |
How well do all practitioners understand their responsibility in improvement through self-evaluation? How has using Building the Ambition led to improvements in children’s experiences? What do we know about the community that children live and learn in? How are we using this knowledge to improve outcomes for children? How effectively do we identify our strengths as professionals and as a setting, to improve children’s experiences and progress? What progress are we making in addressing our identified areas for improvement? To what extent are all stakeholders (children, practitioners, parents/carers and partners) involved in self-evaluation and planning for improvement? What approaches do we use to support our children to reflect on and evaluate our practice and provision? How do we demonstrate that all practitioners are involved in and lead aspects of improvement in our setting? In what ways are our practitioners encouraged to reflect on and share their own practice in taking forward agreed areas for improvement? To what extent do we look inward, outward and forward in our evaluation and improvement activities? What evidence do we have that changes we have made are as a result of our self-evaluation and have improved outcomes for children? |
If you do not feel in a position to influence how personalised support is achieved across your setting then start where you can make changes. That might be your own practice. You might want to complete specialist training. It might be the layout of a room, as suggested above. It might be the way you interact with a child’s family. Document what you do and what the impact is in a reflective diary. You could share you experience with colleagues and that way you might be able to bring about more positive change across your organisation.
Here are other documents that relate to auditing the environment:
Care Inspectorate (2019) My world outdoors [Online]. Available at https://hub.careinspectorate.com/ how-we-support-improvement/ care-inspectorate-programmes-and-publications/ my-world-outdoors/ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (Accessed 10 November 2019).
Irresistible Learning (2019) Early Years 360° Environment Audit [Online]. Available at https://irresistible-learning.co.uk/ resource/ early-years-360-environment-audit/ (Accessed 10 November 2019).
Casey, T. and Robertson, J. (2019) Loose Parts Play Toolkit. 2nd Edition [Online]. Available at https://www.inspiringscotland.org.uk/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2019/ 07/ Loose-Parts-Play-Toolkit-2019-web.pdf (Accessed 10 November 2019).
National Improvement Hub (2019) How good is our early learning and childcare? [Online]. Available at https://education.gov.scot/ improvement/ self-evaluation/ How%20good%20is%20our%20early%20learning%20and%20childcare? (Accessed 10 November 2019).