Ensuring Quality and Continuity of Care in Childcare Settings
At the same time as the free entitlement is being extended and made more flexible, childcare settings have to manage the introduction of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) which comes into effect in September 2008. This raises the challenge of how to ensure quality and continuity of care.
The EYFS breaks down the current distinction between 'education' and 'childcare' and adopts an approach of ensuring that children's development needs are addressed throughout the time they are receiving formal early years provision. It will, of course, remain vital that the 15 hours free entitlement provides childcare of the highest quality and the challenge will be for settings to develop a range of planned activities and experiences that will help children progress towards achieving their early learning goals.
If parents choose to spread the 15 hours across two childcare providers, or if providers decide to deliver the entitlement jointly, the settings involved will have the additional challenge of sharing and recordkeeping to ensure good continuity of care for the child and effective communication with parents.
Resources and documents
These documents and resources describe - or illustrate - the work
being undertaken by local authorities to improve the quality of childcare;
to ensure that the move to flexibility goes hand-in-hand with the EYFS
objectives and that Early Years professionals are supported
appropriately.
Slough's
system of linking children's centre and extended schools initiatives, and
enhancing working relationships between different groups through
forums
This page was last updated on 12 December 2007
