What is the New Version of Child Development?
The new child development setup moves away from linking directly to curriculum statements. Instead, reference material appears on the right-hand side of the screen while you're writing an observation, so you can refer to it as you write.
The focus is now on the written portion of the observation, with staff using the reference material as a guide to highlight key moments in a child's development. This is designed to support a more child-centred approach to practice.
Assessments
The new custom assessment builder lets you create your own assessment configurations and add tracking options if you need them. You can use these alongside the default assessment options, or on their own.
Reporting
You can view past tracking and run reports based on assessments made in any configuration. Reports show the current best-fit judgments you've made for each child, and you can click on a tile to see that child's past assessments in a specific area.
💡 Because the new setup no longer links to specific curriculum statements, statement-based tracking is no longer available in the progress report or on the child's journey
Enabling the New Version of Child Development
To get started, go to Settings → Child Development → Setup and switch to the new child development option by toggling on Activate.
💡 We'd recommend enabling it for yourself first so you can get familiar with it before rolling it out to your whole setting
Toggling on your frameworks
Once you've switched to the new child development, you can turn on the right frameworks for your setting:
Go to Settings → Child Development → Learning Frameworks and enable your frameworks
Then go to Settings → Child Development → Reference Material and turn on your reference material
💡 You'll need to enable your frameworks in both Learning Frameworks and Reference Material for everything to work as expected. Once enabled, your reference material will appear on the right-hand side when writing an observation.