Blog

Do you often have parents asking about what their child has experienced at nursery?

Often when parents pick their children up from nursery, it can be difficult for them to get a full understanding of their child’s experiences and activities of the day. As a nursery manager or owner it is so important to be able to share ‘wow’ moments and achievements with parents, strengthening parent partnerships and keeping them in the loop with their child’s development. 

Seeing the Big Picture

At Connect Childcare, we understand the importance of being able to effectively track child development across your setting. The Big Picture Report feature enables you to create your own overview of child development across all of your cohorts, using the Birth to Five Matters or Development Matters framework. This information can then be shared with parents through the ParentZone app instantly, ensuring that all parties are kept in the loop on their child’s achievements. This engages conversations and further enhances parent partnerships, allowing for a better relationship between practitioners and parents. 

Engaging Parents is Key

Strong parental engagement is central in promoting children’s healthy development and wellbeing. Yet one of the most challenging aspects of managing an early years setting is parents actively engaging with practitioners, to understand more about their child’s education. 

As we all know, the demands on parents’ time and attention coupled with varying drop-off and pick-up times on different days means it can sometimes be difficult for families and practitioners to chat face-to-face regularly, and reliably. However, there are other ways your nursery can interact with parents to bolster engagement.

Establishing regular contact — perhaps via an app such as a ParentZone — can supplement in-person interaction, providing a space for important communications, and a record of observations, suggestions, requests and notifications.