To think there is too much box ticking & not enough interaction with pre-school children?

[BoobleBeep]

I helped out at DD's pre-school last week, all parents are supposed to go in once a month to lend a hand.

I was told that my job was to serve the snack and work behind teh scenes so the qualified classroom assistants (not sure what the rold is called) could interact/work with the children.

I was really surprised to see minimal interaction, there were 5 members of staff, 3 of whom were standing around with clip boards observing the children and making notes, the other two were discussing the children and drinking tea, I think I saw them sit down with the children on two occasions.

The children were just milling around on there own so I went and sat down to read a story to them and they all flocked over and seemed really pleased to have an adult spending time with them.

It was similar last time I helped out too. I asked my mum about this as she used to be an infant school teacher and she said it was the main reason she starte dto hate her job in the end, it turned into box ticking and took away so much interaction with the children.

AIBU?

YANBU. They aren't gorillas, and teachers are not that bloody Jane Fossey woman. They don't need to be "observed", they need to be played with, interacted with, talked to, tickled...

Actually, children do need to be observed.

It's the only way that we can accurately record their achievements and make sure that they are learning well. I agree there is too much of it, we have to make sure children can do a huge number of things, and while it's important that we know they can do all those things, I don't see why we need detailed evidence for all of it. Taking photos helps a lot! They are going to change the EYFS, and hopefully that will create less paperwork.

All nurserys record development differently, there is no standard way, and there are some systems that are easier to work with than others, but you only learn that by trial and error.

Observations are very important when it comes to identifying SEN, especially when parents don't want to see that there is a problem.

But they don't need to be observed so much that they aren't being played with - that was my point. Granted, I made it badly... sorry

YANBU but I work in a school nursery and what you describe is not my experience. We have great fun playing with the kids!

Oh, and what you call children 'milling around on their own' could be children engaged in child led learning through play.

If you are concerned, you should talk to the manager, who should be able to tell you in detail what the learning outcome of each activity is, and how it relates to the EYFS.

Penguin, I agree wholeheartedly that they shoudl still be played with and interacted with. That's why the system a nursery uses is so important.

Nurserys are often in a very difficult position because of everything they have to do though. Sometimes you get the best and most informative ob's when ther is an adult interacting with the child, and another adult just observing and writin down what they see and hear. But we don't have enough staff to do that very often, so the quality of the observations becomes poorer, which means we need more of them to make sure we record everything the government says we should be recording.

Staff ratios work bery well when it comes to looking after the children, but not when it comes to having to do all the related paperwork!

slavetofilofax - I am not saying it is the pre-school's fault, they are doing what is asked of them by the government & OFSTED. I just feel there is too much observing & not enough interaction

I think that children need a mixture of adult interaction and playing on their own. In a good nursery they do get a mixture of activites. I think a big problem is that ratios in some nurseries are insufficent to allow the EYFS style of teaching to work. Also a nursery with a higher level of SEN needs more staff. The biggest problem is that SEN is often first intenfied at nursery and there is no support in place.

Prehaps you need to look at your child. Are they happy, do you feel they are developing? If the answer is yes to both questions then you don't need to worry.

I agree with you on the paperwork, Slave!

Too much stuff has become encased in red tape nowadays, I think it's getting to be a bit stupid. It's getting to the point now where you can't take a breath without wondering if you're stealing someone elses air by accident, or if someone will complain because you're contributing to global warming by expelling your carbon dioxide. Too much paper, not enough action IMO.

And it's very much a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If you play with the children too much you may miss a special need or autism, and in extreme cases people may question you as to why you enjoy spending so much hands-on time with children. But if they don't and they observe, then people complain that they aren't playing with their children enough and enhancing their social skills by interacting with an adult.

I think the children are treated as objects to observe & over-analyse. Every aspect of their behaviour is speculated about, I don't think it's healthy.

yanbu - that is exactly the reason why my dc went to pre-school in the nursery setting.

I agree in principle but I didn't feel this was the case with DS1's experience through the early years - I think his staff managed to do their observations through interacting with the children. And at the end of year 1 we get to keep a lovely, massive scrapbook with loads of pictures and written observations of parts of his development. DS2 is there now and he's always telling me how he's played with his teachers. He has SN and is being used by a student teacher for observations so he gets lots of playing with her!

I agree. And it just takes one over-zealous observer to see a child blinking too much (or something else just as innocuous), and decide it's a nervous tic and therefore must be discussed with the parents. Who will then go on to talk to their GP and waste resources on something that could be completely innocent.

(And as it happens, that's a true story. My brother tends to blink a lot, and it was described as a nervous tic. Had to go to the GP and endure tests for things like infantile OCD and autism and all sorts. Bloody stupid - there was and is nothing wrong with him.)

My first DD went to a sure start nursery and I found it to be quite different, they were always playing with the children and seemed to be having fun

Sorry, cross-posted with MissBetsyTrotwood. I was agreeing with the OP when she was saying that the onus is on the observation rather than the interaction.

I totally understand where you are coming from Booble! As a practitioner, I often feel I spend too much time writing things down instead of just playing. I can assure you, I know which I would rather be doing!

The pressure is on for staff though, I think they can often be made to feel like they are slacking if they don't have a notebook and pen on them at all times. I know I have felt like that in the past. And it's a vicious cycle, because when you interact more with the children, you see more of the sort of things that would make great observations. A good observation imo is one that can clearly tick lots of boxes in one go! But if you are doing the interacting properly, you can't be writing it down! It's quite hard to remember childrens words accurately after the event, and while the pressure is on, you feel like you have to be writing down everything!

It might help you to feel better about it if you ask about the system your nursery uses to record your dd's learning, and you will be able to tell if they are using an efficient system. Have a look at her ob's, and you will be able to see if they are spending too much time writing down things that don't really need to be written down. Like if you have 20 bits of paper that say 'Littlebooble picked up a pen with her right hand and drew striaght lines from top to bottom' then you know that they are not making efficient observations, and are just doing it for the sake of it.

slavetofilofax - I agre, there seems to be a lot of pressure on the staff, I don't think they are doing it because they enjoy it, it must be quite frustrating, my mum certainly found this.

They do have learning journeys but TBH I felt they were a bit pointeless, as you said it was, 'Ellie can now recognise here own name' 'Ellie bulit a tower of three brick', I felt like saying no shit...

YANBU. DS1 and DD were at our wonderful nursery years ago before the whole EYFS (or whatever it's called came in). DS2 is now there and, although the staff are still wonderful, they do spend much more time box ticking rather than playing. I trust all the staff completely and would trust their judgement about any concerns they noted without them having to write a novel about every child. DS2 has been there for 2 1/2 years and he has 2 massive box files of "observations". These days a baby can't just pick it's nose, it has to be recorded as "evidence of fine motor skills".

I can completely see why you find it pointless, but we really do have to record that a child can recognise their own name!

A better observation would say 'E was able to recognise her own name from a list of 10. We counted the list of names and E pointed at each one and counted to six withoout prompting. She was asked how she knew it was her name, and replied 'because it has the picture of the elephant next to it'. She is aware of the letter sound 'e' in her name and in the word elephant'

That way, you tick lots of boxes all at the same time, and in about two minutes can get a lot of information that covers more than one area of development, meaning that you don't then need to waste time writing three of four things down separately on sparate pieces of paper. The parent can then also see that the child has been interacted with, rather than just stood two meters away and watched your dd pick up something with her name on it.

I hope I'm making sense here!

My sons old nursery was like this the staff seemed to always be away from the children watching when i went in (obviously i didnt spend the whole day so cant say it was ALWAYS the case).
He started a nursery attached to a school when he was 3 and it seems totally different they have areas for different activity and there seems to be an adult sitting in each area to help or play.They do keep shockingly complex records in the "about me" books though!

My ds's nursery seems to do formal observations and recording over a couple days just before each Parents Evening - you can tell as ds is wearing the same clothes in most of the photos that go with the text!

Fine by me as whenever I chat to the staff they clearly know and understand where he's at, and the written records every 4 months just enhance that, but I bet it's why Ofsted are never hugely impressed - it was obvious recently that Ofsted were about to visit as all the kids suddenly got assigned key workers who were listed on the wall, as opposed to 3 staff looking after 12 kids, key person assigned when the kid first arrived, but main responsibility being down to whoever the child took a fancy to.

There's always someone being cuddled. Makes it a good nursery in my book.

I think YABU.

The job of the staff is not just to 'play' with the kids, it's to provide learning opportunites and interact with the kids as and when THEY want it. You learn quite a lot about 'reading' play cues and only joining in with the kids as and when they are looking for input from you. (So not just when they come up to say, can you do X, Y, Z, but when they are looking a bit lost, looking around for approval etc.) quite often if you interrupt without their being a cue that this is what they want they will quite often step out of their game and stop playing.

A lot of children love being read stories, but in terms of long term development letting a child pick out a story on their own, sit down, work out which way it goes up and which way to turn the pages and follow the pictures to 'read' the story helps more with their long term development skills.

So what seems passive often isn't, if that makes any sense...

I would say that there being no staff member actively interacting with any child the whole time you were there would seem quite unusual to me, as pre-school children do generally quite often want to interact with adults more often than they want to interact with each other.

I went to an education conference a while back. The key speaker gave a lecture called "Children do not grow taller just because they are measured often".

His point was that too much emphasis, from pre-school through to secondary, was being placed on testing, whether through formal exams or through the EYFS observations.
I've used the phrase since, when people have mentioned at various points that their child didn't get a grade on their homework (for example). No, but they did get a long list of comments of where they were brilliant and where they could do with improving. Which takes longer to write than a grade but 'how do you know how well you've done without a mark on the bottom?'

YANBU. I taught a Nursery class in a state primary school a few years ago and hated all of the records that I had to keep. I had a class of 26 children in the morning and a class of 26 different children in the afternoon. I had 1 teaching assistant. Every morning and afternoon I or the TA had to observe a child for 10 minutes and write down everything he/she did. Then we had to spend 10 minutes or so linking which learning objectives the child had met during the observation. While 1 of us did that the other couldn't organise a structured activity as she had to be on hand to help put aprons on children, helping them put paper on the easel, sorting out little issues etc so that the observer wasn't disturbed.

We also had to write 'incidental observations' on post it notes every time we saw/heard a child do/say something that was evidence that an objective had been met. Plus, we had to take photos for evidence.

At the end of the year I had to use all of the evidence to assess the children and show which objectives they had met. This should then have been used by the Reception class teacher as her start of year assessments but on the last day of term I was told that when the children went into Reception they would be assessed as much lower than I had assessed them, so that when they left Year 6 it would look like they had made outstanding progress since starting Reception. I just wish I had been told this at the beginning of the year as then I wouldn't have worried about doing assessments and would have just spent a lovely year playing with the children and doing wonderful activities with them.

A few years ago none of these assessments had to be done and yet teachers still knew where children were in terms of skill/ability at the end of the year because they'd spent a year spending quality time with children and really getting to know them.

Sounds like a particularly crap pre-school to me.

The EYFS is interpreted in different ways by different settings - obviously your pre-school has failed to use any common sense in how they implement it!

I work in a nursery, and observations don't take me away from the children - it only takes 30 seconds to write a quick post-it note. Same with photos, the kids love it when you get a snap of them on a climbing frame or with some artwork.

With that many staff they have more than enough for someone to be playing, someone to be leading an activity, someone to be observing/photographing if necessary.