This is the story of how a pen and paper solution in a special school went digital and became a global success

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I was early years lead and Deputy Head at Cherry Garden School, a school in Southwark for children aged 2-11 years with severe or complex learning needs.

Part of my role was to identify what progress might look like for children with the most significant needs,. We wanted to find a way to communicate that progress in a way that was easy for parents to understand and that celebrated each child’s development.

This was a tall order. Capturing the progress of children with SEND can be a frustrating experience in early years. Many of the assessment systems available are geared to children who develop typically, and make progress in an upward, linear fashion.

One of the challenges of Development Matters is that when using it as a tool to measure progress, a child with significant needs may remain at say ‘8-20 Developing’ for the whole academic year. Despite practitioners (and parents and carers) knowing children with SEND had made progress during the year, it was nigh on impossible to capture this in a meaningful way.

For children with SEND progress happens differently and it isn’t always linear. How can this be captured when there is simply a list of tick box statements? How can the progress of children with SEND, particularly those with profound needs, be captured and celebrated?

I was also aware that within the early years sector children generally attended mainstream settings and rarely had an EHC which would have released extra funding. Settings often lacked resources for specialist staff and I was regularly asked by EY practitioners about how best to support the progress of their learners with additional needs. Sometimes even very experienced practitioners would have concerns or lack confidence.

Lateral thinking

We started by considering how a child develops laterally. How do they generalise a new skill? This is important in the development of all children, but it has extra significance for SEND children because it helps to demonstrate a deep-rooted understanding and an ability to apply a new skill in a range of contexts. For example, if a child is learning to exchange a ‘raisins’ symbol to formalise their communication, a typical linear assessment system will describe this progress simply as: “can exchange a symbol for a motivating item”. However, for a child with significant learning difficulties there is a huge amount of additional learning that could be captured by considering lateral development:

Can the child exchange the raisins symbol with a range of adults in the classroom, or just their key worker?

Can they use their symbol to make a request in other parts of the school, e.g. in the dining room?

Can they use their symbol at home to tell their parent or carer that they want more raisins?

At Cherry Garden, we wanted to create a system that could capture the complete ‘generalisation of a skill’ and by doing so demonstrate the significant progress being made by a child in early years with SEND. 

Paper and pencil

We started to design ‘Branch Maps’ for each of our six curriculum areas which used the progress milestones from birth to five years of a typically developing child. The documents were intentionally one page each, so that practitioners could quickly ascertain a child’s current learning level.  The maps were organised to allow for flexible, child centred progress. They allowed teachers to show a child’s broad learning and wide range of progress, whether linear or lateral. 

When working with children with additional needs, a sound understanding of typical development in young children is important. It helps you to find gaps in learning, whilst also guiding you to set appropriate next steps, most importantly ‘in the moment’ whilst you are playing.  The six curriculum areas link neatly with the EYFS, and to keep things streamlined Communication Language and Literacy are together, but separated into their individual ‘strands’ on the document.

On the documents, under each milestone is an additional box where the ‘criteria’ are added.  This guides the practitioner to focus on elements of the milestone that are functional for children with SEND and allows for generalisation of skills.  The criteria for the ‘raisins’ communication example above might say: “Can request for an item using their communication system: In the classroom; In the playground; In the dining hall; and At home”

The new approach was a radical shift for Cherry Garden School but we recognised that to really provide a useful tool we needed to develop a fully interactive digital version. As a school we didn’t have the resources, or expertise, to do this alone. Instead we decided to find an edtech partner that could help to support the development of a digital version, and so we turned to Tapestry.

From paper to digital

Tapestry is an online learning journal which enables early years practitioners and teachers to capture children’s learning and development.  Cherry Garden School had used Tapestry in their Early Years for some time and, when we spoke to them, we were delighted they wanted to get involved.

Following seven months of intensive collaboration, Tapestry created a cherry orchard graphical interface. This contains interactive cherry trees and flowers which are used to represent a child’s learning. Each cherry tree is made of branches that represent the strands within a particular area such as writing or reading. When a statement is marked as secure a leaf appears on the corresponding tree.  The system places as much importance on lateral progress as linear. This progress is represented by the flowers in the cherry orchard. As a skill is generalised the petals on the flowers deepen in colour.

Teachers have found the new system to be a much more motivating and enjoyable way to gather evidence and assess than the previous tick box system. As well as this, using an evidence gathering assessment system has allowed teachers to use the child’s learning journal as a reference point to reflect on their progress. For example, sharing photos and videos of one particular area of learning with team members and wider school staff to highlight progress in a way that wasn’t possible previously

Cherry Garden goes global

Working with Tapestry has enabled Cherry Garden School to launch what started in Southwark to a global audience. This means that across the world practitioners, children with SEND and their parents and carers and able to easily access a unique assessment and parental engagement tool.

It can be hard to record the small steps of progress made by a child with special educational needs. The outcome of this is that children with SEND can appear to be ‘trapped’ at one level for months on end, when they have actually achieved a great deal.

Cherry Garden Branch Maps is designed to solve the problem because it captures progress regardless of the route a child’s learning takes.

The system is easy to use for staff and allows parents to engage much more fully in their child’s learning. Parents can explore the interactive orchard and click on the various leaves to see photographic and video evidence related to a particular milestone.

The fully interactive version of Cherry Garden Branch Maps is available free of charge to all Tapestry subscribers.

For those who aren’t subscribers, there is also a printable version which is free to download. For more information visit:  https://tapestry.info/features/cherry-garden.html