Keep an up-to-date overview of your key children, celebrating the unique child,
without excessive paperwork caused by ticklisting, tracking and developmental bands.
Note: Your data is safe. This site is fully GDPR compliant. The questions are generated locally on your computer using JavaScript that has loaded in your browser. No personal information that you enter to generate questions is sent or stored online.
This time it's personal! Personal Profiles are a new way of staying on top of what your key children are achieving, while dramatically cutting down on excessive paperwork time.
We are rightly told not to use Development Matters or Birth to Five Matters as ticklists, but how do we draw from their knowledge and guidance without doing so? Here is a format that can show you the way. Best of all, rather than leaving you with generic developmental statements that can apply to so many of your intake, it celebrates the unique child as you write vividly about each individual in your care.
No longer are you asked to gather evidence for information you already know via long and time-consuming observations. Now you can get the main points across within a new system by giving answers to some basic questions.
On the Profile Generator, simply enter the child's first name, select a gender and a phase for the child, before clicking 'Copy questions'. Then, in your online learning journal, create a new observation post for the child and call it 'Personal Profile', and paste the set of 21 questions covering all seven areas of the EYFS (plus three for the Characteristics of Effective Learning). As you answer the questions you build up an overview of the whole child. As your child learns and develops, you alter your answers to record this progress. If a child's attainment starts to go beyond the scope of the question, you find a more challenging question.
There are three sets of 21 questions for the seven areas of learning, each set being progressively more challenging, with the questions tailored with pronouns for girls, boys and children with a non-binary gender. Depending on which you choose, the questions are suitable for babies, toddlers, pre-schoolers, reception children, and children with or without special educational needs. And if you wish to tweak the questions or come up with your own ones, you can. It's all very flexible, and can be customised to your heart’s content.
An article on Personal Profiles can be read in the 'Coffee Break' section of the Foundation Stage Forum website.
It takes two to tango! Progress Plans take the information from Personal Profiles and uses it as a springboard to identify interests, strengths and challenges for each child. This is then used to inform personalised planning as well as recording its effect.
By responding to emerging interests, the Plans help children to have an enjoyable time at nursery. By focussing on areas they find challenging, children can receive extra support where they need it. And, of course, by identifying where children are already excelling, they can be stretched even more.
The Plans also helps towards building a partnership between home and nursery, by sharing with parents and guardians about how a child is being educated at nursery, as well as providing ideas for how their learning can be further developed at home.
A Progress Plan also helps practitioners to develop an acknowledgement and appreciation of the broad progress that a child has made since starting at your setting, by remembering a child's starting point and comparing a child then with now.
On the Progress Plan Generator, simply enter the child's first name and select a gender before clicking 'Copy Progress Plan questions'. Then, in your online learning journal, create a new observation post for the child and call it 'Progress Plan', and paste the set of five questions. As you answer the questions you go from formative to summative assessment, before planning, teaching and recording the progress, while keeping parents informed as well as inviting their participation and insights.
Everything you wanted to know about Personal Profiles and Progress Plans
but was probably too bogged down in paperwork to ask!
What are they?
The Personal Profile is a practical approach to streamline the paperwork needed for each child while still maintaining an overview of the whole child across seven areas of learning. The Progress Plan is a method of taking the raw information from the Profiles and turning it into an action plan that involves parents and other carers and which celebrates the progress a child has made at your setting.
Does it work with what I am using already?
It is compatible with both Birth to Five Matters and the new Development Matters, and can be used on any type of online learning journal. You can even copy and paste into a Word or Pages document to print out if you are a paper-based setting.
How do I get started?
You start by copying and pasting a set of questions, created by the Profile Generator (on this website) into a single observation such as within Tapestry or another online learning journal. Then you answer the questions about a child as best as you can, using further observations to fill in any gaps. The main thing is that your answers are vivid and celebrate the unique child. When you are ready for the Progress Plan, go to the Progress Plan Generator to copy and paste further questions into a new observation.
Will the Personal Profile save me time?
Yes! It is a huge timesaver. A lot of the answers you will already know from memory. You do not need to provide evidence for what you know about the child's learning. You can simply state what you know. This is in line with Ofsted's guidance for Registered early years providers which states: Practitioners should draw on their own knowledge of the child and their own expert professional judgement and should not be required to prove this through collection of physical evidence. As well as this, answering three PSED questions, for example, with three sentences is generally much quicker than writing several paragraph-long observations to cover the same points about PSED.
Can I alter the provided questions of Personal Profiles?
Feel free to tweak the questions so that the answers better reflect the child’s interests, needs, and learning and development. You can mix questions from different phases. It’s really up to you.
When do I start changing the questions?
Once you feel a child has outgrown a question or a set of them, you can move on to the next Phase or make your own one up. All within the same observation post. No need to create a new post.
This sounds like a great idea! But I don’t like the labels for each set of questions.
Fine! Edit to your heart’s content. If Phase 1, 2 and 3 don’t work for you, nor does Emerging, Developing or Secure, here are some other naming conventions you could use:
Or you could just not use any names at all. The Personal Profile generator does not label the generated questions.
I have a new key child. Which set of questions do I start from?
Phase 1 is roughly pitched at the level of learning and development children are typically at from birth to one, and older children at an earlier stage of development than what is typical for their age. Phase 2 is roughly pitched at the level of learning and development children are typically at from about their second birthday to three. Phase 3 is roughly pitched at the level of learning and development children are typically at from about four. So if a new child starts aged 3, and you think their level of attainment is typical for their age, you might wish to start from the Phase 2 questions rather than Phase 1. These are ballpark approximations. Due to the effect of COVID19 affecting children's life experiences and education, please do not be surprised or alarmed if Phase 1 questions are still revelant for most of your two year olds, or Phase 2 questions are still relevant to some of your four year olds.
Why do I need a Progress Plan when I am already using Personal Profiles? Isn't a Personal Profile enough?
While a Personal Profile is about observational work and formative assessment, a Progress Plan is needed in order to use this information to identify interests, strengths and challenges, and to use these to inform and shape planning. The Progress Plan involves Summative Assessment, Summative Judgement, Planning, Teaching and Learning, so it covers a lot of ground.
Can a Personal Profile help with an Ofsted inspection?
Ofsted are placing a greater importance on adults knowing the children. A completed Personal Profile makes a great, quick refresher to read before an Ofsted inspection and to share with colleagues.
What about report writing?
It makes writing the Two Year Check, School Transfer Document and EYFS Profile much easier by providing key information about the child already in one place. The Personal Profile also effectively removes the need for a summative report for each key child at the end of each term.
What do I use as a baseline / starting point for a child?
You can use the Prime Area questions and answers to act a baseline to measure future progress against. Copy and paste this into a new document if you wish to retain a permanent record of a starting point.
Isn't a Personal Profile just a ticklist by another name?
No. The whole approach of Personal Profiles is to take the narrow format of closed developmental statements which only allow for a yes/no answer, and inverts them into an open questions or prompts that allow for a wide range of nuanced answers to be recorded. Unlike a ticklist, it helps to capture the uniqueness of each child because the words you write are especially about a particular child.
Aren't the Phases just another name for developmental bands or ranges?
No. They are more about the choice of questions a practitioner is considering about a child, and knowing which set is most relevant to the challenges a child is facing right now. While this does relate roughly to children's level of attainment, the questions are too broad in scope to be a precise indication of a child's exact achievement.
Is it easy for monitor a practitioner's work?
A Personal Profile will highlight where there are gaps in a practitoner's knowledge about the child, for example, if they haven’t answered any questions about the child’s mathematical abilities. The same applies to a Progress Plan, which will clearly show a gap if, for example, a child is only ever supported in their challenging area, but never in an area where they are strong.
What about tracking?
If you wish to see the progress a child has made, and you use Tapestry, you can use the View Edit History function to see how far a child has come. Or if you wish to retain a version of the Personal Profile as a child's starting point, or when a child is about to start a new set of questions, you can copy the first version of the profile into a new observation, so you have an older version that you can compare later progress against.
How do Progress Plans measure progress?
They are created in line with Ofsted's guidance for Registered early years providers (16 August 2021) which states:
Inspectors will want to find out about the story of the child, including:
In answering questions within a Progress Plan, you can track how a key child went from being upset at drop-off time when she first started at nursery, to building a bond with her keyperson. to eventually becoming fully settled and saying she "can't wait to come to nursery!" This provides you with 'qualitative tracking' which is much more meaningful for parents than stating a child went from 22-36 Secure to 30-50 Developing. By thinking along these lines, you are already one step ahead if you are asked a holistic question about the child's progress, for example at an inspection.
How do I know if a child is on track?
You don't. But honestly? We never really knew that anyway. Judging whether a baby or even a toddler is 'on track' to achieve the Early Learning Goals when they haven't even lived 40% of their life to when they finish Reception has always been very, dubious unreliable guesswork. As Julian Grenier, author of Development Matters, has said on tes.com, we "need to ditch the phrase 'on track.'". What is the supposed value of identifying if a child is 'on track'? In order to support that child? But we do not actually need to find out whether any child is 'on track' in order to support a child that finds a particular area of learning a challenge. Nor do we need to compare child against child. Using a Progress Plan, we can to identify which are a child's strengths and which is a child's most challenging area, in order to support a child in both.
How do I use the Personal Profiles and Progress Plans to support children where they could do with extra support?
One way of deploying the Personal Profiles is to answer questions about Prime Areas in the first half-term of the child, and the Specific Areas in the second half-term (while making any necessary tweaks to the Prime Area questions and answers). In the following half-term, you can use the Progress Plan to identify both a Strongest Area and a Challenging Area for the child (along with their main area of interest). Then you can devise a plan every half-term onwards to support the child. This is not about a child's 'next steps.' If we believe in children as autonomous beings, we don't get to define these! Instead, what you are planning are your Adult Next Steps in response to what you see in a child's learning, playing and exploring. This can be written up as a fresh observation for each area, using the 3 ‘I’s format (intent, implementation, impact) in the observation. Any signs of progress can also be added to the child’s Personal Profile which is continually updated as and when needed.
This sounds like too much work! I though we were moving away from doing paperwork
This system is not actually particularly onerous in terms of time. Currently, there is a lively debate within early years about how much is an appropriate level of paperwork, and certainly no one wants to work within a regime where excessive paperwork takes staff continuously away from high quality interactions with children. However, Personal Profiles and Progress Plans enable staff to have an overview of their key children, one that can be deployed as memory joggers for themselves and to share with colleagues, paprents and other professionals. If practitioners only record 'wow' moments, that can create a very distorted picture of the child, with some areas of learning not even covered. Also, if practitioners say they know their children inside out and are making plans purely in their head rather than doing it within a Progress Plan, what happens if they are off work or leave? One of the perennial challenges within nurseries is the fulfilment of the planning cycle. For example, observations might be written but the knowldege gained is not used to inform planning. Or plans are made but are not carried out. Or plans are carried out, but the effect on learning is not ascertained. In addition, many staff concentrate on where a child seems to be struggling but not on where they are excelling. Written Progress Plans help staff see whether the gaps are in their approach to supporting children's learning and development, and recording things fosters accountability for the choices they make.
Can you explain more about the questions regarding the Characteristics of Effective Learning?
Of course! The three characteristics relate more to 'how' children learn rather than 'what' they learn. In Birth to Five Matters (and indeed the first Development Matters), they are subtitled as 'engagement', 'motivation' and 'thinking.' However, for the sake of clarity, the first characteristic has been renamed as 'participation' here, as 'engaged' is often used as a synonym for 'motivated'. The premise of the three questions is that children are at their optimum state for learning when their hands, heart and head (participation, motivation, thinking) are all at work together. The times when each characteristic is present is acknowledged and celebrated, and there is space for examining what it's going to take to unlock a child's participation, motivation and thinking if it is not yet present. Clearly, this requires a key person to know their key child very well. As they could feasibly occur in either, the questions are created by both the generators for the Personal Profiles and the Progress Plans, to give you a choice over which document you prefer them in. You can then delete them from the other document. No need to answer the questions in both!
Please be an utter diamond by making a PayPal donation...