How often do you hear early years practitioners complaining about the chores connected with assessment and paperwork? I hear this a lot when I am working with schools and settings. I also see practitioners endlessly scribbling on Post-Its or holding up iPads to snap photos of children so that they can collect evidence of their learning, when it looks to me like those children would do better if they had someone to listen to them and play with them.
This bothers me greatly, because it makes me feel like we must have taken a wrong turn in the early years. In this age of measurement and ranking, we are in danger of placing so much emphasis on our Learning Journeys, online journals and collections of assessment information that we end up neglecting what matters: children’s minute-by-minute experiences in the early years, and our opportunities to support their learning, offer them the best possible care, and teach them new skills.
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