Barnet Early Years Alliance (BEYA) is comprised of three Outstanding nursery schools and a Children's Centre, serving just under 500 children. The north London settings use a play-based, open-ended approach referred to by staff as ‘places of possibility’ where the aim is for staff and children to learn from each other. While not research-led in the same sense as some of the other nurseries in this series, the federation shows how practitioner research and collaboration at the grassroots level can lead to leaps forward in practice. This is done through a group called ‘Leaders of Early Learning’, formed by BEYA which settings in Barnet have been invited to join. The group meet several times a year.
ASSESSMENT TOOL
A key recent piece of work is an assessment system, OP&L, referred to as Opal. Born from frustration at the long lists of predetermined statements and vague wording in existing assessment systems, the tool was designed by a the Leaders of Early Learning group plus a wider coalition of professionals, including teachers, colleagues from Middlesex University and PVI managers.
‘We had over 200 years of experience around the table,’ says Kelly Brooker, executive head teacher of BEYA. This experience was used to create six-monthly milestones, determining what they would expect a child of each age to be able to do. ‘Our main focus was to make the milestones really unambiguous so they could be understood by anybody,’ she says.
These milestones then formed the basis of an assessment system which would aim to move practitioners away from spending time behind tablets, collecting evidence and generating data and instead give staff time to interact with children. ‘If we’re capturing the moment, we can’t be part of the moment,’ says Brooker. ‘We heard one Reception teacher doing one observation a day for every child in her class. That's 150 observations a week.’
The system is thought to be in use in over 100 early years settings as far away as Bangkok and Dubai. As of yet, there has been no formal research conducted to measure the impact or effectiveness of the system, although settings in Bristol conducted a large piece of work comparing the OP&L milestones against Birth to 5 and Development Matters. Their conclusion was that OP&L milestones were in line and addressed some of the gaps left by other frameworks.
Positive feedback from schools includes a nursery teacher who said, ‘I now only observe to understand more deeply about children; my time spent is more meaningful and purposeful. This is of benefit to the child and their family, to myself and to my team.’
HOW DOES IT WORK?
OP&L is a summative assessment of learning and development completed for every child every six months, using six-monthly milestones (expectations for children aged 24 months, 30 months and so on). Rather than all children being assessed at the same time at the end of a term, workload is spread throughout the year as assessments always correspond to the child's chronological age. ‘One of our big bugbears is that at the end of the Reception year, all children are assessed against the same statements in the profile, regardless of the fact that some could be nearly a year younger,’ says Brooker. ‘And that's just not fair. This way, you can do the profile, but if you also use OP&L, you can tell the other side of the story, so they might not be meeting the writing targets for the profile, but are they meeting milestones for their actual age? It makes us feel reassured that we’re doing what's fair for children.’
The observations and assessments are called ‘spotlights’. If a child was born in November, they will have a spotlight in November and also six months later, in May. Staff meet to share knowledge of the child and their informal observations of the child's ideas, thoughts and creativity, and to decide whether their age-related milestones have been met. This process is exactly the same for children with additional needs.
While practitioners do keep written records, they don’t take notes during observations or feel pressure to collect evidence. The focus is on engaging with children and knowing them well, so they can easily judge whether the child meets their milestones or not. ‘They’re not having to test children or make them do things to find out if they can tick something off the list,’ says Janine Medway-Smith, assistant head teacher at Hampden Way nursery. ‘They know because they are spending time with the children.’
This knowledge is then shared with parents. ‘The big focus is on celebrating the child, but we do think it's really important to be transparent about milestones,’ says Brooker. ‘I don’t think you should shy away from those conversations with parents.’
Parents also play an important part in sharing their knowledge about what their child can do at home. This may be particularly important for children who are more verbal when at home, or who speak English as an additional language. This way, ‘a child isn’t always going to be falling behind in communication and language because they’re not speaking English, when they’re speaking fluently in their home language,’ says Medway-Smith.
Insights from the child's spotlight are then used to plan the environment to support the child and shape their future learning. months later, there is a spotlight review to discuss the child's progress so far, whether planned learning opportunities have taken place and what impact they have had.
Although staff judgements are trusted, without the need for accompanying evidence, the system is carefully moderated. Leadership support staff by doing the assessments with them until they feel confident to do it themselves, and each month, leadership check who isn’t meeting their milestones and do any necessary follow-up. ‘It's very rigorous,’ says Brooker.
PROGRESSION IN PLAY
More recently, BEYA has also worked collaboratively with the same group of professionals to create a ‘progression in play’ document (see box).
Brooker explains that the project started around the time when everybody had concerns about progression maps and felt pressure to sequence children's learning or focus heavily on adult ideas about what children should learn. ‘We wanted to bring the focus back to the importance of playing,’ she says. ‘Rather than thinking about what we can “fill children with”, it's about what they can show us they know.’
The project focused on helping staff articulate and understand how play progresses, both within individual play episodes and longitudinally over time. ‘Their play progresses in terms of complexity, and their concepts, knowledge and skills,’ says Brooker.
BEYA felt that although there is a lot of research and theory written about play, the sector was lacking tools that support people practically to advocate for play and talk about it professionally. ‘You could be observing a child in the mud, but can you articulate what it is about what you’re seeing that's important?’ says Brooker.
Medway-Smith describes how the approach has supported staff at all levels, with more and less experienced staff working together in staff meetings, sharing and analysing videos and photographs of children at play. ‘It's supported them in their discussions with parents, explaining why play is important and the skills it develops. We've got a display in the hallway and the parent of that child was fascinated by how much she was learning from one simple play episode.’
‘In busy settings you don’t often get the chance to stop and talk about the importance of these things,’ says Brooker. ‘It's about helping to create more knowledgeable practitioners, more reflective practitioners.’
BARNET EARLY YEARS ALLIANCE (BEYA) FACTS
- Barnet Early Years Alliance (BEYA) is a federation of three Outstanding nursery schools – Hampden Way Nursery, St Margaret's Nursery School and Brookhill Nursery – and a Children's Centre, all based in north London.
- Serves 500 children aged two to four years old.
- Has produced, along with a coalition, OP&L, an assessment tool to reduce paperwork and better reflect the child. They offer training in this tool for settings, while Learning Journals has designed a digital version.
Progression in play
The ‘progression in play’ document is a guide to noticing and observing play. It contains completed play observations for children aged 6 months through to 72 months.
The observations are detailed, containing photographs and responses to 4 key questions:
- What does the child seem curious about?
- What did the adult do?
- What knowledge and skills is the child developing?
- Why is this play important?
Although it contains a blank format to complete further observations, the aim is for this to be used for training purposes, not for practitioners to routinely complete lengthy observations for every child. Instead, the document should be used as a guide to scaffold practitioners’ thoughts and discussions about play.
FURTHER INFORMATION
- Information on OP&L: https://beya.org.uk/professional-development/opal
- OP&L assessment tool featured in Alistair Bryce Clegg's blog: https://abcdoes.com/abc-does-a-blog/2022/04/14/opl-assessment-an-update
- For the ‘progression in play’ document or more information on OP&L, contact opal@beya.org.uk
