Evidence Me fully supports the new 2021 EYFS Statutory framework. The official Government guidance is broken down into 2 parts:
Part 1 – The Statutory Framework
This is the guidance that every setting must follow. The guidance concentrates on the Early Learning Goals (ELGs) – that is, what children should be aiming for by the end of the Foundation Stage. The Statutory guidance can be downloaded here.
In summary, the statutory guidance states:
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- Practitioners should perform their own frequent formative assessment. This should be done through a combination of day-to-day observations, made in the setting and outside of the setting by parents and carers.
- Physical evidence is not required.
- At the end of the foundation stage, you should perform a “summative assessment” against the ELGs using your own professional judgements and recall. This is the “Foundation Stage Profile”. You don’t need to refer to evidence if you don’t want to.
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Part 2 – Non-Statutory “Development Matters” Guidance
To achieve the “formative assessment” part of the statutory guidance, the Government understands that it is possible many settings will want to collect evidence and perform some monitoring of progress from term to term.
So, to help with this, the Government has produced some non-statutory guidance – a simplified and updated 2020 version of “Development Matters”.
You can download the non-statutory “2020 Development Matters” guidance here.
This Development Matters framework is already available in Evidence Me as the “EYFS Pilot 2020” framework. This will become the standard EYFS 2021 framework in Evidence Me from September 2021.*
Summary: The spirit of the new statutory framework
The new framework is intended to ensure that practitioners spend the maximum possible time with children and spend only the minimum time on administrative and assessment tasks. To that end, the guidance explains that it isn’t necessary to gather physical evidence of learning.
We completely agree that all onerous tasks should be eradicated. And, as any Evidence Me user knows, creating observations using our app takes no time at all. In fact, Evidence Me is the most efficient and effective way to combine parental engagement and formative assessment in the Foundation Stage, giving you the maximum possible opportunities for interacting with the children.
Using Evidence Me in line with the 2021 Government Guidance
Evidence Me is 100% compliant with the latest Government guidance and will be a huge help in delivering it.
Here at 2Simple, we know that many settings really enjoy sharing observations with parents and also find observations a really useful way to keep track of what has been covered in the setting.
The new statutory framework places an emphasis on both formative assessment and summative assessment. Here’s how Evidence Me helps with both of these.
Formative Assessment – Capturing Observations:
To perform your formative assessment, you should continue to capture observations as normal and tag these with the Development Matters 2020 objectives (EYFS Pilot 2020 framework). This supports your formative assessment process by allowing you to monitor what individual children have covered and identifying what they have not yet covered.
The Framework Coverage, Teach Next and Coverage Tracker reports gives you all of the information you need for your formative assessment. These reports are particularly useful for formative assessment, because they highlight any gaps in child development.
These reports are totally based on what the children have experienced in observations. You don’t need to visit an assessment screen or make any onerous judgements. It is enough to just tag what objective the children have experienced in the observation.
Summative Assessment – ELG Assessment & Foundation Stage Profile:
Evidence Me uses an extremely powerful assessment feature to help you with your summative assessment and your EYFS Profile assessment against the ELGs.
You can either use solely your professional judgement, or you can allow the “Assessment Assistant” to provide some decision support to you. It does this by checking to see which Development Matters objectives have been experienced by which children, and highlighting this in the assessment grid.
For more information on the Evidence Me Assessment feature please CLICK HERE.
The “Birth-5 Matters” Framework from Early Education
Evidence Me supports the “Birth to 5 Matters” framework that has recently been released by the Early Education initiative.
This framework is different to most other Evidence Me frameworks in that individual objectives are not available for selection or assessment. Early Education has stipulated this, to promote an approach where children’s progress is not monitored in as much detail as is typical currently.
Please click here to see our dedicated area for Birth to 5 Matters.
Webinar
If you missed our recent webinars regarding using the new Development Matters and Birth to 5 Matters in Evidence Me don’t worry you can view a recording of one of these webinars below:
*(Please note that the original Development Matters framework will also be available in Evidence Me, updated with the new ELGs. So you don’t need to use the new development Matters if you don’t want to. Some settings prefer the extra detail in the original Development Matters guidance, so we are keeping that too. It is perfectly fine and allowable to use it within the new statutory framework.)