EYFS lesson observation with Ofsted judgement criteria

This is an old post which I am leaving online - since it was written the Ofsted framework has changed considerably. There's a more up to date post here on my blog and I'd be delighted if you took a look at my new book, Successful Early Years Ofsted Inspections which is a detailed look at early years inspections under the Common Inspection Framework. If you're still interested in the history read on...

With the new Ofsted framework in place, I have been updating lots of forms and systems in the school where I work, and one of the trickiest has been how to record observations of teaching and learning in nursery. Our current version is available here - you are welcome to download it and use it, or adapt it. Please share your views and any feedback by commenting on this post.

There are a number of dilemmas here. First of all, typical approaches to "lesson observation" rarely feel appropriate to the EYFS. In my previous role as an advisory teacher, I was often finding that headteachers or senior leaders expected to come into nursery and see a "lesson being taught" - in other words, a group of children under the direct instruction of the nursery teacher. This, of course, represents only a small aspect of appropriate pedagogy in the EYFS.

Secondly, Ofsted require schools to have a clear view of the quality of teaching and learning, to be able to answer a question like "what proportion of teaching do you judge to be good?" But within a school, this can easily lead to high-pressure situations, with teachers feeling they have failed if they are observed as anything less than "good" (especially now that what used to be "satisfactory" has been retooled as "needs improvement").

I daresay we all want consistently good teaching, or better, for children in the EYFS. But this fixation on grading is not likely to bring about a culture of shared professional endeavour, or encourage teachers to experiment and take risks.

When an individual teacher is struggling with something, successful schools provide an environment where it is OK to be honest about what you find difficult, and an environment where colleagues will share their practice. Where there is undue emphasis on the grading of teaching, this type of collaboration may be discouraged, and the ethic of professionalism may be overwhelmed by an individualist desire to be the best, or at least better than the person next to you.


So, whilst it is necessary for observations to result in grading, this should be a subsidiary aim - the main aim of the headteacher or other senior leader must, surely, be to observe colleagues in order to help them to become better teachers. This requires a culture of shared endeavour, not a high stakes, pass/fail culture.

The question of how to judge what the previous EYFS usefully called the "enabling environment" is also difficult. I think that this is where the ECERS-R and ECERS-E scales are useful, as they give some very precise descriptions of quality resourcing and organisation for learning.

Lastly, some sections of this proforma draw on the new EYFS "Characteristics of Effective Learning". [opens as a PDF; see pages 4 to 7]. If teaching is good, then the logic of the EYFS suggests that some or many of these characteristics will be observable.

There are plenty of other interesting approaches to this problem, most notably from Alistair Bryce-Clegg and from Lucky 2212 on the TES Teaching Resources. Both of these require updating to be consistent with the Ofsted 2012 framework for school inspection.