Monday, October 20, 2008
PbyP Foundations Launched
We now have a specially designed version of PbyP for the Early Years and Foundation Stage which creates a file of snapshot evidence for the EYFS Profile.
Following the principles of PbyP it enables the gathering, storing and recording of evidence for skills for life and learning with the learner fully involved in the process. We have taken each of the 13 learning scales which form the EYFS Profile and created a PbyP skills ladder for them. Each ladder has the nine identified assessment points with storage, marking and recording for each, thus creating a profile for each child.
The teacher (or any other adult given password secure access) can upload evidence for any child in their class for any one of the nine points on any one of the 13 scales, in a wide variety of formats. By clicking on a child's name/photo, the teacher can view their EYFS Profile, seeing both how much and exactly what the evidence was for each of the skills. Evidence can be uploaded very quickly via the quick upload button in a wide variety of formats including video, image, audio file as well as word and text. This means a teacher can take a snapshot of children displaying skills whilst they are taking part in the everyday activities of the classroom day.
To involve children as much as possible in the process of recording their skill development we have re-written each point of the 13 scales in language accessible to young children. This appears alongside the official statement. We have also provided a video link for every statement which has a young child saying the child statement.
Whilst PbyP Foundations is designed for very young children we wanted to ensure we had built into the system the Foundations for peer assessment. Class teachers are given a class password and a personal one. The class password allows the teacher to choose some work/evidence to show to the rest of the class or send to another class to see. The class can then discuss what they like about a piece of work , make a comment and sent it back for the other class to see. Each class teacher can use this to begin to encourage the culture of sharing your ideas and work with other children, whilst maintaining the control over what is sent for peer assessment. We think children as young as four and five will be excited by being able to show their work to classes in other schools and will enjoy sending and receiving comments.
The site is designed so that only the class teacher can have access to the full profiles and evidence for every child, but the teacher can choose to give a unique password to parents to view their own child's profile at home. The teacher can also choose to give the password for uploading evidence to parents, carers and other settings such as After- school clubs. This password allows for evidence to be uploaded for any child in the class: this is then stored for the teacher to view and decide whether appropriate to record in a profile.
PbyP Foundations does meet the requirements for schools to provide an EYFS Profile for each child at the end of the year in which they are five but it also provides the foundations to nurture an awareness in children of how we learn together and of how they like to learn best. Sharing and working together with parents and other education setting is inbuilt into the system.
PbyP Foundations will be launched by Cambridge Education with a supporting resource pack in November. From 27th October there will be a screen shot demonstration of Foundations available at http://foundations.pbyp.co.uk and when full testing is complete it will be available at www.foundations.pbyp.co.uk
The exact release date will be published on our website as soon as available. For more information before this date including how to become a trial school, please contact Anna Hazeldine