Carrying out a learning walk to monitor and evaluate your early year’s provision
To make sure your early provision is offering high standards of care and education, managers and practitioners should carry out regular audits to monitor and evaluate the provision. These audits can highlight areas of weakness and give managers and practitioners a particular area to concentrate on. By standing back and evaluating the provisions, it can help monitor the impact the environment has on the level of teaching, learning, and assessment. As Ofsted are very keen to see how managers regular evaluate the early year’s provision, it is important that systems are put in place to do this.
There are many different types of ways to evaluate and monitor the early year’s provision; peer observations are perfect for observing practitioners practice. However, they can include points about the environment. Some settings carry out termly audits of the provision, giving a more in-depth insight of the environment as a whole, e.g., the areas of continuous provision, both indoors and outdoors. Any findings from these audits are then included in an action plan or an improvement plan. Having information documented is a great way to show Ofsted that managers and practitioners are consistently monitoring and evaluating the provision. This will also highlight manager’s leaderships and management skills.
As well as ensuring the provision is of high standards don’t forget to audit other areas of the nursery, e.g., office based documentation, e.g., are all training records up to date, etc. Many people could argue that their paperwork is always up to date but when running a nursery there is often very little time for paperwork, carrying our regular audits can help keep on top of the forever growing pile of paperwork.
A learning walk is an easy way of monitoring and evaluating the early year’s provision, creating focused questions to answer when walking around the environment can help managers and practitioners look for particular things.
Why not use this learning walk that we have created to help monitor and evaluate your provision. To download the Learning Walk sheet click here