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Your professional judgement IS enough! 

If you are reading this blog, you already care greatly about your role as an early years professional and will want to do the best you can for you and most importantly the children you care for! So I’d like to remind you that…

Your professional judgement IS enough!

You know your setting and your children, and more often than not your gut instinct is probably right! I love the theory that we have 3 brains, our head brain, our heart brain, and our gut brain. Often they will work together as they are all interlinked and sometimes on their own too, for example, your gut could be telling you something isn’t quite right with a child you are caring for, and you might not be able to pinpoint exactly what but your experience and knowledge (head brain) is telling you that you need to look closer or ask for some further help. And that is incredible, never be disheartened if you don’t have all the answers or you need to ask for help, everyone does. 

We can often find ourselves looking for validation about our thoughts and opinions and concerning our work as early years professionals this could be our judgement on our children’s progress. How much paperwork we are required to do has reduced over the years and we have gone from using progress trackers as mandatory to back up our judgements on children’s progress to now being told we don’t have to do this. 

Ofsted wants to reduce the paperwork burden on early years professionals and when talking to you about your children and their progress they want to hear your professional opinion because you know your children best! They won’t ask to see your observations or how you track children’s progress, they want to hear from you instead – of course you can absolutely still use progress trackers or do written observations – it’s all down to what works for the individual. Ofsted just won’t ask to see paperwork except for the specific assessment requirements set out in section 2 of the EYFS.

Remember – the expert in anything was once a beginner! You absolutely do not need to know everything nor are you expected to, learning is lifelong so to keep on trying we will keep on learning and building on our knowledge. Similarly, if you don’t feel so confident about all the typical developmental milestones at different ages and stages and need to refer to guidance, like Development Matters – that is not a bad thing! Everyone has to at some point, we can’t remember everything all of the time – what I’m trying to say is don’t doubt your professional judgement because you may not have all the answers all of the time!