1. BUILDING THE AMBITION Welcome
Good morning ladies and gentlemen my name is Grant Campbell and welcome to Craigentinny Early Years Centre. Today we are going to look at Building the ambition – How we involve parents.
Now firstly, before we look into this, the presentation will be broken down into sections: -

2. BUILDING THE AMBITION Building the Ambition – Image of the Child
What We Did
Involving the Parents – Questionnaires
Our Findings
What's Next?
Difficulties we had, problem solving – solution focused
Good morning ladies and gentlemen my name is Grant Campbell and welcome to Craigentinny Early Years Centre. Today we are going to look at Building the ambition – How we involve parents.
Now firstly, before we look into this, the presentation will be broken down into sections: -

3. BUILDING THE AMBITION
The Building the Ambition document was published in August 2014, and acts as a national practice guidance to support staff in providing high quality early learning and childcare.
It provides support for putting theory into practice by offering case studies and reflective questions to provoke discussion and to help support improvement.
As part of our Standards, Quality and Improvement Plan (SQIP) group we took an aspect from this document The Image of the Child.

4. IMAGE OF THE CHILD
“Each child is unique and a competent and active learner whose potential needs to be encouraged and supported. Each child is a curious, capable and intelligent individual. The child is a co-creator of knowledge who needs and wants interaction with other children and adults. As citizens of Europe children have their own rights which include early education and care”.
“Be child-centred, acknowledge children’s views and actively involve children in meaningful ways in everyday decisions in the setting”.
“Offer a nurturing and caring environment
“Provide appropriate spaces to play and learn with a range of possibilities for children to develop their present and future potential”.
“Be responsive to children’s changeable interests and demands”.
As stated in the document, the term “Image of the Child” is often used by practitioners and a high level value is placed on taking account of the interests of the child, but what does this mean in practice?
The European Commission, Early Childhood Education and Care, describes the image of the child as: refer to slide
It also states that services for young children need to: refer to slide
As a large staff force we believe we offer this on a daily basis across all three of our centres (CEYC, Leith CN, Drummond CN)
Children are active, experienced learners with natural curiosity who are unique individuals. At the earliest stage they are interested in themselves and their immediate environment. When children come to our settings they need a happy environment where children and adults are actively engaged with frequent smiles and laughter. The environment should be rich in opportunities to acquire language and encourage communication, inquiry learning and be involved in exciting experiences which at the same time are calm, comforting and responsive. They need the warmth of positive adult to child interaction. This includes adults who provide appropriate physical affection and who comfort children when they are upset.

5. What We Did….
Tasks to complete in order to bring this to fruition. These included: -
Review the play policy
Daily evaluation am/pm asking “What will we do tomorrow?”
Staff become familiar with Building the Ambition documents and use evaluation tools
Display knowledge and understanding to parents/carers regarding Building the Ambition. (Poster). Involving parents.
Develop an ICT policy around the slide show
Evidence play to parents/carers through slide show as well as floor books and e-journals
Once we had discussed this as a team, we delegated out who would look into completing these tasks and gave ourselves a time allocation to complete these. Our first task was to review our current play policy and amend as required. This was a relatively straightforward task, we revised it in September 2015 and will review it again in August 2016, (Play Policy and ICT Policy on wall display)
We wanted to evidence play to parents/carers through slide shows on a television loop, as well as e-journals and floor books, we planned on doing this across the three setting. So we firstly spoke about ordering a television, brackets so that we could show the parents images of daily play over the loop system. We then also had to think into adapting an ICT policy (will be displayed on wall display), this policy had to be devised in order to ensure that all who use the nursery have clear and concise information in regards to our ICT policy. We had to make sure that every parent/carer will receive relevant paperwork to consent to their child’s images being used within the nursery premises for use on the television loop. We developed a consent form which all parents had to complete, enabling us to allow children’s images to be used or not. (Staff to become familiar with the Building the Ambition document and use the evaluation tools, have daily evaluation both am and pm “What will we do tomorrow?”)

6. Involving the Parents – Questionnaire
What we did
We handed out a number of questionnaire to a number of parents across the three settings to find out: -
Have you heard of Building the Ambition
Do you know what this document is about?
If you answered yes to Question 2, how much about this document do you know?
Would you like some/more information on this document?
What parents said - Our Findings

8. Q3. How much do you know about this document?
1 parents responded with "Heard about it at school but not in a lot of detail".

9. Whats Next? What are we going to do next?
We plan on developing a leaflet for parents to inform them more about the building the ambition document itself, (smaller version on the poster for wall)
Stay and play sessions have now started for parents to come in and play with their children in the setting. This is currently on a Thursday morning and afternoon and we plan on developing this further over the coming weeks.
Difficulties along the way – always solution focused
COMMUNICATION
QUESTIONNAIRES
RESOURCES
COMMUNICATION – as our staff team is spread across the three settings, we relied quite heavily on communicating with one another through s. This included sending a round robin to the rest of the team regularly, to give a general update on how we were getting on with the tasks set, as well as passing ideas by one another. We also held meetings after work on occasions, so that we could once again come together and discuss our next task.
QUESTIONNAIRES – getting the responses back from the parents, so asking kindly whether they can do it there and then
RESOURCES – we did have to put some money into developing this across the settings this included, purchasing a television for CEYC in order to display the images on a loop onto the screens. We also had to order digital TV adaptors which cost £28.64 and an HDMI cable at the cost of £3.08, which was for each of the settings, so in total £95.16.
The poster as well, would took to: - _____ and it cost ______
If you are interested in hearing how to put a poster together, please feel free to contact me.