The Power of Parent Observations

Flewitt, Rosie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1986-0644 and Cowan, Kate (2021) The Power of Parent Observations. Tapestry.

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Abstract

Parents and carers play a crucial role in supporting their young children’s learning and development, but do they realise how important their insights are and how much early years settings value them? Research funded by the Froebel Trust found that most parents and carers underestimated how important it is for them to share their knowledge about their children with educators and were reluctant to add their own thoughts and observations to children’s early education ‘learning journeys’. In our study we looked at observation and documentation practices in three different early education settings in London – an early years unit in a primary school, a children’s centre, and a private nursery. Two of the settings used paper-based learning journeys to document their observations of young children and one used the digital documentation system Tapestry. We interviewed educators and parents/carers in the three settings, observed classroom practice and looked through children’s learning journeys with the children themselves. Our main aim was to understand what documentation systems were being used in each setting and whether they were working well for educators, parents/carers and children.