Tip Category: Senior Leadership

The Statutory Framework for the early years foundation stage outlines the early years practitioners’ role in communicating with parents,

‘1.16 The key person must seek to engage and support parents and/or carers in guiding their child’s development at home’ The Statutory Framework for the early years foundation stage March 2021.

The impact of parental involvement in learning is evident in numerous research findings including Goodhall and Vorhaus, 2011, “The more parents are engaged in the education of their children, the more likely their children are to succeed in the education system”.

Learning Ladders’ parent portal, Ladders at Home creates opportunities for conversations about learning to take place between practitioners and teachers, on-demand, remotely, at scale.   

Automate

Automate sharing of observations with parents, freeing up practitioners to spend time with children.

Parents are informed, partners in their child’s learning with opportunities for 2-way chat.

Support

Qualified early years teachers unlock vocabulary, offer day-to-day opportunities for parents to guide development at home.

Parent articles are available for all Areas of Learning and Characteristics of Effective Learning.

Access

Parent articles are accessible for all with translate tools to consume support in over 100 languages.

Support is accessible at the exact point of need, viewable on any device, term time or holidays.

Bespoke

Practitioners can create bespoke articles for their unique setting.

Model specific resources used in settings, explain pedagogy and approaches to parents at scale.

Efficient communication, support for parents that is available to resend over time.

Find out more about Ladders at Home here or get in touch with one of the team by emailing hello@learningladders.info.

Practitioners’ observations of children’s development are central to delivering the four guiding principles that shape practice in early years settings.

Learning Ladders allow practitioners to filter observations using pre-set or bespoke custom tags to ensure all children develop secure foundations for learning.

Unique child

Create tags to monitor children’s individual pathways; from emotional health and wellbeing and physical health to children’s unique culture and community.

Positive relationships

Tags can be used to monitor children’s interactions and relationships, secure attachments to carers and ability to regulate feelings thoughts and behaviours.

Gain insight into children’s developing strength and independence in their positive relationships.

Enabling environments

Use tags to monitor how children develop as active learners in enabling environments.

Review how the environment enables and encourage children’s agency as they make decisions, take risks and built confidence.

Create tags to filter observations showing opportunities for development in play both indoors and outdoors. Monitor the accessibility of environments for children with health conditions or disabilities.

Rates of learning and development 

Use tags to monitor how children learn through their behaviours, dispositions and habits of mind summarised in the three Characteristic of Effective Learning.

How are tags used in Learning Ladders?

An admin user can access tags within ‘settings’ (read help guide here)

When uploading an observation simply select a tag from the pre-set or custom added tags available.

View observations in a child’s portfolio, filtering by tag to view corresponding observations.

For more information about how Learning Ladders’ EYFS module can support your setting email hello@learningladders.info, or for member schools read on here to learn more about tags.

The Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage outlines the requirements for planning in the early years,

“1.11 Practitioners must consider the individual needs, interests, and development of each child in their care, and must use this information to plan a challenging and enjoyable experience for each child in all areas of learning and development”  The Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage, March 2021.

Learning Ladders provides practitioners with choices to decide what is right for the unique children in their setting.

Non-statutory Framework statements from Development Matters 2021 are made available in the early years module, reducing time-consuming admin for practitioners.

Effective support for less experienced practitioners is provided with pre-loaded guidance notes from Development Matters, as well as exclusive exemplification guidance from early years consultant, Jan Dubiel.

Alternatively, practitioners can choose to import their own curriculum (in any language) in a quick and simple to create import file.

The Creation Zone keeps editing tools simple: drag & drop, rename and add statements.  No need to contact system providers, pay fees or wait for changes.  

Schools can plan a challenging and enjoyable curriculum with embedded links to resources from our Curriculum Lab.  Search for resources from our quality partners at BBC, Oak Academy and Developing Experts with a copy & paste of the URL against the curriculum statement. 

Upload links to environment plans, moderated work or policies and embed links to Phonics or other schemes stored on the shared drive. 

Using Learning Ladders early years module practitioners can create an evolving, working curriculum document that adapts and grows over time.   

Contact the team to find out more about how your setting can create a bespoke curriculum for the Foundation Stage.

The Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage encourages a 2-way partnership between practitioners and parents,

“2. 1. In their interactions with children, practitioners should respond to their own day-to-day observations about children’s progress and observations that parents and carers share” 

Why is 2-way communication between teachers and parents important?

“Education is a conversation, not a transfusion”
Sir Ken Robinson

Learning Ladders create the conditions for conversations about learning to take place; conversations between teachers and students, teachers and parents, parents and students.

Research shows that “The more parents are engaged in the education of their children, the more likely
their children are to succeed in the education system” (Goodall and Vorhaus 2011).

Which types of observations can parents share?

Parents can share photographs, videos or audio files with practitioners through Ladders at Home, the parent portal.

Feedback from parents informs future teaching and learning, creating a joined up picture of a child’s progress.

How can teachers manage this communication, at scale?

Teachers have a dedicated ‘Notifications’ feature in Learning Ladders.  Within this feature, they can view and respond to all messages sent to them.

Manageable communication around learning with no extra strain on teacher workloads, all in one system.

If you have any questions or would like a demonstration of the 2 way communication contact the team at hello@learningladders.info