June Newsletter

Hi, everyone.

I hope you’re all well. We’ve got lot to tell you about this month so here we go!

TEC

Earlier this month we held our fourth Tapestry Education Conference. This one focused on parental engagement and we heard from speakers Jamel Carly, Suma Din and Janet Goodall (EdD), with guest host Tom Harbour from Learning with Parents. If you didn’t manage to join us for the live event, don’t worry! You can watch the full recording and download any supporting materials here.  

Android and Fire Update

Earlier this month you may have noticed your Android or Fire app update. And if not, you can manually update it from the Google Play or Amazon store. The new version number is 4.0.3

The update includes a few new features and improvements:

·        Add and view flags

Adding flags is just for staff members, but you can decide if you want relatives to be able to see them too when you turn on each flag set.

·        Record audio clips and attach those to observations
 

·        Switch between separate Tapestry packages

This is a feature for you if you have multiple Tapestry logins e.g., if you have children at two different schools/settings or you are an educator covering multiple year groups and each year group at your school uses a different Tapestry account. It stores a list of the accounts you’ve recently logged into on the device you’re using and lets you access the PIN screen of any of them. You can choose which account you want by clicking on the new ‘switch school/nursery/childminder’ button.

·        Reply to observations with an observation

This new button at the bottom of observations lets you create a new observation and have it automatically linked to the observation you’re replying to via ‘page links’. 

Birth To 5 Matters on Tapestry

For those of you already using the new flag system for the upcoming changes to the EYFS this September, you may have noticed some new flags and reference material appear.

This is to include the non-statutory guidance document “Birth to 5 Matters” in the current flag system. The additional aspects within Birth to 5 Matters are now available to select as Flags; they are nested within the original area flags:

As well as these new flags, you will also notice additional ‘reference material’ which relates directly to Birth to 5 matters appear in the Reference Material box on the right-hand side.

The Reference Material box now also appears when you make a Reflection, whereas before it was only visible while making Observations.

A Change of Name – EYFS 2021

We have changed the names of a few things on Tapestry this month. This was to reflect the correct year the EYFS reforms came into official use, and also to include the Birth to 5 Matters document alongside Development Matters. Below is a list of what has changed:

The flag sets will now be called:

- EYFS 2021 (rather than Development Matters Guidance 2020)

- ELG 2021 (rather than Early Learning Goals 2020)

- CoETL 2021 (rather than CoETL 2020).
 

The Areas of Concern screen will now be called ‘EYFS 2021 Areas of Concerns’ (rather than DM 2020 Areas of Concerns) and that will be found under EYFS 2021 in the tracking tab (rather than under DM 2020).
 

The EYFSP form will be called ELG 2021 EYFSP and will be found under ELG 2021 in the tracking tab (rather than ELG 2020).

This won’t impact any data you’ve collected using those features up to now.

The New Thoroughness Screen

We have a new monitoring screen for the EYFS 2021 framework, with a focus on thoroughness. It shows you how many observations and reflections have been flagged with each of the EYFS 2021 flags for each child.

We strongly support the idea that practitioners do not need to make lots and lots of observations and we do not expect educators to try and reach a certain number in each aspect. We do still think that having a screen like this will be beneficial to educators though.

It will allow you to quickly see if you’ve made fewer observations in specific areas, giving you the opportunity to investigate why that might be and ensure your curriculum contains rich experiences tailored to your children.
Another example of why this screen might be useful to you is if you see a wide disparity in the amount of observations for certain areas, which might highlight a lack of confidence in your staff. This can guide you to more specific CPD options.

EYFS 2021 Report Format

We have a new report template: EYFS 2021.

It is very similar to the existing EYFS report template, but it does not have the age band and refinement assessment information, leaving only free text boxes for notes and next steps for each area of learning.

 The ‘Child’, ‘Details’, ‘CoETL’, ‘Additional Information’, ‘Child Voice’, ‘Relative Contribution’, ‘Signature’, and ‘Media’ sections all remain.

It will automatically appear in your list of available templates as long as you have the ‘EYFS 2021’ flags enabled.  

Payments:

If you wish to pay for Tapestry by cheque or BACs please can we remind you:

Cheques should be made payable to ‘The Foundation Stage Forum Ltd’ and NOT Tapestry or the early years foundation stage forum.

BACS – we moved our service provider for our banking in October 2019 and our bank is now HSBC sort code 40 18 22 / Account no 42445565

Our old bank account with Lloyds will be shut soon so payments made to that account in error will not be processed.  If you need further information, please email the finance team on bacs@eyfs.info

If you do not deal with finance in your setting, please ensure this information is passed to the finance team so they can make sure their records are up to date.

Updating your contact details

With the end of year fast approaching and staff potentially moving on, we encourage you to take 1 minute to just review the contact information you have set on your Tapestry account. It’s important to keep this as up to date as possible!

A manager can find this information by going Control Panel > Settings > Contact Details.

You will have two options: A contact email for us to use to contact you if we need to and a contact email address for relatives to use. Only the former is compulsory.

That’s it for June! Have a lovely July everyone. As always, if you have any questions you can reach us on customer.service@eyfs.info