This resource allows you to record your own reflections after watching the video below.
Video transcript
Jo Darbyshire
Regional Manager South Coast & West Region
The Creche & Kindergarten Association
There's so many opportunities to gather information in an early learning environment that sometimes it's hard to make an assessment of where you're going to go, what you're going to write down, what you need to keep, what you don't need to keep.
I think you need to start the year with your systems in place, and you need to have your team on board with you too, because they're capturing just as much information about the child, and you want their voice in there as well. So if you sit down together as a team, work out the ways that you're going to capture child's learning and development throughout the year, how you're going to sit together as a team on a regular basis and, make assessments of where that child is currently at and where you'd like to their learning goals to be you will be setting yourself up well for success.
When you're looking at the learning and development and the data that you've collected about a child, you make assessments or judgments about where they might be sitting currently and then you draw on your knowledge of early childhood. You draw on your learning and development knowledge. You draw on where you know that children are likely to go, where they're likely to be interested, and that helps you to decide on those next steps. So it might be that you set up an environment to intentionally, introduce something that's at a little bit more of a challenge, offers a little bit more of an opportunity to engage with other children if that's the area that you're looking at.
When we're gathering data about the children and assessing their learning and where they are on the continua we sometimes can see where we might need to support and adapt or scaffold what's going on in that area and it also helps us to understand how we might be able to pull back some of that support at various times. It may mean that we need to reintroduce it again if there's a change in how that child's arrived that day, if there's a change in circumstances. If the experience is in a different context as well, sometimes we might need to, step in a little bit with a bit more support for a period of time and then pull back.
So you need to spend some time looking at the evidence. But it doesn't mean that you wait to do that either. There'll be times where you, if you know your child really well and you have been monitoring their learning development, you'll know which opportunities you're going to continue to follow up with in the immediate. So you'll know if you're looking at your intentional teaching, you'll know which things that you're going to extend on, and bring the child along with you, take them back to sometimes, and which things are you going to let go.
So if we're keeping an eye on the child's learning and development and monitoring what's going on, that will help us to make decisions about how we support the learning that's occurring.
- Last updated:
- 18 December 2025
