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As well as helping parents to understand their child’s social, cognitive, physical, and emotional development, involving families in what their youngster has done or achieved on a daily basis can assist in creating a more inclusive and extended learning environment.

Being able to communicate effectively with parents to share resources, stories, concerns, or developments helps practitioners to understand the children in their care so much more. It allows them to compare what they see day-to-day in the childcare setting, to the home setting – where children may experience and display different behaviours and feelings.

While the updates to the framework don’t mean the complete abolishment of progress tracking, the focus is now more upon the method in which this is done – and the fact this doesn’t all have to be written down. But despite this fact, communicating with parents remains just as crucial and should not be forgotten about.

Childcare providers have long recorded youngsters’ special moments and developments in online learning journals, and while these aren’t a specific requirement under the revised EYFS, many settings will naturally continue to use them as they offer a safe, convenient, and shareable way to monitor children. And this is completely fine.

Keeping these systems in place enable early years professionals to quickly snap a photo or video of a child and share it in real-time with parents, whereas if this isn’t documented, it’s impossible to remember and convey all the magic moments that have happened in the setting, all in one dialogue.

This two-way conversation not only bridges the gap between practitioners and parents – helping to build better relationships – but it massively benefits the children. It enables both parties to gain an understanding of the bigger picture of their child’s learning journey, alongside encouraging the metacognitive process – allowing little ones to revisit and reflect on things they’ve learned.

Ultimately, practitioners need to choose the method that best suits them when it comes to monitoring development. And if learning journals are here to stay in your setting, you shouldn’t feel like you have to populate them every day – it’s far more important to ensure that what you do decide to input and save is helpful and informative for you as a practitioner. 

As a result, this will not only provide a positive learning environment for the children, but it will create a setting in which practitioners feel valued, parents feel involved, and development is at the heart of everything the collaborative does.