To expect dd's nursery forms for primary to include more recent observations

[PrincessScrumpy]

dd is going to primary in September. She loves nursery so I don't want to make a big fuss and I figure school will find out her abilities for themselves and not rely entirely on paperwork, but her stepping stones forms (although good with blues and greens) are matched with exemplar work. The most recent comment in it is November 2011, which suggests dd hasn't progressed at all since then, but I know she has.

Do I just sit back and let school see for themselves or do I query it at nursery? I don't know what the steeping stone levels actually mean so don't know how accurate they are and I know they only observe her twice a week so I see more or what she can do. I'm not fuming just wondering if it matters or not.

School will do their own assessment once they've all settled in. She's got plenty of time to show them what she's capable of.

I thought they had to comment every week? nov last year seems a bit slack.

I am a reception teacher. We look at the the colour band and summary comments and thats it really - we certainly don't look through the evidence file. After a few weeks of in-school observation, we then do our own assessments and re-do the entry scores anyway so really don't worry.

Its a bit strange their are no recent obs. though - may be worth a casual word with her key worker when you pick her up one day.

What do the colour bands mean?

I don't think it matters, tbh. The school will have their own systems. I'm quite impressed that the nursery are successfully resisting the push towards staff spending all their time doing paperwork, actually!

I would talk to the nursery, it isn't acceptable that they haven't added to her observations since November. As a childcare practitioner it's not about additional paperwork it's about ensuring that we regularly observing and planning for childrens individual needs, they should have been doing this. Although the teacher probably won't have time to go through everyone's file, it's your daughters record of nursery and should be kept up to date!

Are the forms the nursery are using colour banded accorded to age? because if this is the case then they are unable to add to them until they reach the next age band

This is the case in the nursery i run as the booklets we use are age banded and can only be filled in when the child has hit a certain age and from the colours you have stated it sounds like the same booklet but they are not called stepping stones profiles any more as theses were from the very old foundation stage curriculum and not part of the EYFS or the new EYFS that is due to be implemented in September

Hope this helps

It could be that they feel they have enough observations of your dd and that if they go any further then there will be nothing left in her profile to be covered in Reception.

It's not great that they haven't done proper observations, but sometimes nurseries do the observations that come towards the end of the profile a bit differently. I know when I used to work in a nursery it used to seem pointless doing the smaller 'snapshot' observations with a child that was ready for school, because by the time a child has been with you for a couple of years, everything that could be written onto a small piece of paper already had been. When it got to that stage we used to do observations over a longer period of time, say an hour at a time, and write down almost everything. These would be much fewer than the smaller observations so a child would only have this done a few times but they would give a different kind of information to a teacher who did feel the need to read them. It would have been easy for a parent to see fewer dates and think we had been paying less attention to their child. But that really wasn't the case.

I wondered if something like that was going on, but November does seem like a very long time ago.

Daisy nursery, do you seriously still do observations by highlighting age bands? I didn't even think you could do that anymore! Not every child is the same you can't split them into age bands like that!

Happilymarried155: We don't highlight age bands but we document children's progress at certain ages in a booklet given to us by the local council that is done county wide by all nurseries/pre school providers that must be filled in at 11 months, 26 months, 36 months and 50 months if they are attending a nursery or pre school setting at these ages

It also has a transfer to reception page that has a section for the child's comments, parents comments and the practitioners comments and then a section to fill in scale points 1-3 if they have achieved these at nursery

However just because the books are filled in at these age stages does not mean that the children are only highlighted at these ages, in fact children are often highlighted above the age they currently are using the EYFS
This also allows us to ensure each child is hitting there targeted milestones and allows the parents and practitioners to see if there is a area of development that the child could improve at and then this is discussed with the parents when they are completed

We also observe and plan activities for the children every 6 weeks in addition to these books and the written observations go into the learning journeys as well as snapshot observations and summative assessments which are completed every 6 weeks