SEF – Completing self-evaluation in Early Years

Sue Cowley offers tips on completing your SEF (self-evaluation form) and explores the choice of quality assurance frameworks available for early years settings…

Why do Early Years settings use SEF?

Your SEF offers you a chance to highlight the great practice that goes on at your setting. It should help you identify those areas where you know you need to improve. A SEF should also show how you plan to improve them.

It works well to write your SEF using a mixture of narrative and bullet points as appropriate. This allows you to elaborate on any key points and also to give detailed evidence to support what you say.

Use examples from your day-to-day practice to demonstrate your key strengths. Include enough detail so that someone coming into your setting can see exactly how you do what you say you do.

Is a SEF compulsory in Early Years?

It is not compulsory for Early Years staff to complete a SEF. In 2018, Ofsted removed the SEF template from its website.

Managers and practitioners do need to show that they are using self-evaluation to reflect on their practice and to make improvements to their provision.

If you choose to complete a SEF to aid your reflection on your setting’s strengths and weaknesses, ideally, you want a framework that…

• encourages staff to participate in an ongoing process of reflection
• gives a chance for all stakeholders to have an input
• gives sufficient detail about your setting, but is still manageable
• highlights your strengths
• identifies your areas for improvement and helps you set targets

Statement, Evidence, Develop

Where you set targets for improvement, include information about who is responsible and when any planned improvements will take place.

You can use a three-step process: ‘Statement, Evidence, Develop’. This ensures that you include sufficient detail in your SEF about what you see as your strengths:

Give a statement: Make a statement of fact about one of your setting’s strengths.

“As a setting we have an ongoing commitment to helping children build their physical strength and stamina. We encourage them to enjoy regular participation in sports, and in other physical and creative movement activities.”

Support it with evidence: Support the statement you have made by giving specific evidence. If you use lots of approaches, this can usefully be done in a bulleted list.

“As part of this commitment, we:

• have a weekly visit from a specialist children’s yoga teacher, in which the children learn yoga movements based around children’s stories
• run an annual sports day, which is very well attended by parents and carers
• have developed an outdoor area, with a space for playing on ride-on toys and room for growing plants
• take the children to dig at our allotment area each week, where we grow our own crops.”

Develop the point: Make links to other aspects of your provision, or talk about how you will sustain this strength in the future.

“We are keen to widen the variety of physical activities that we offer, to match each child’s needs and interests.

Following a discussion with children and parents about new sports they wanted to try, we are going to book a weekly visit from a qualified early years tennis coach for the summer term.

A staff member will contact our local tennis club to identify a suitable coach (Action: SP to make contact by 21st March).”

This process can also be used to write about what you see as your areas for improvement.

Finding evidence

Evidence can take many different forms. It might be quantifiable data, for instance, responses from a parent questionnaire, in which parents grade your setting, or data measuring children’s progress.

It could also be examples of things you have done at your setting to enhance your provision such as a visit you have arranged from an outside group.

You could also use comments from parents in a ‘Comments Book’ or responses posted by parents on your setting’s website or blog.

In a busy early years setting, it is often tricky to remember all the great things you have done, so have a small SEF notebook, freely available to all staff, in which they can jot down a note when they do something interesting. I

f you don’t have the space to include all this information in your SEF, highlight your notebook to the inspector as another source of evidence.

The Bristol Standard

The Bristol Standard is a framework that enables settings to continually reflect on their practice to improve the quality and effectiveness of their provision.

Through a cycle of informed discussion, self evaluation and action, the Bristol Standard identifies good practice.

To achieve the Bristol Standard, staff need to reflect on the 10 dimensions of quality over two or three years, depending on which pathway you use. You gather evidence of your strengths and set actions for improvement to submit for validation.

The ‘10 dimensions’ that the Standard asks settings to reflect on are as follows:

1. Values, Aims & Vision

2. Relationships & Interactions

3. The Reflective Researchful Practitioner

4. The Physical Environment

5. Play & Learning Experiences

6. Observation, Assessment & Planning

7. Staffing, Leadership & Management

8. Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

9. Partnerships with Families and Community

10. Accountability, Monitoring & Impact

As well as the Bristol Standard, there are various other quality assurance schemes that you might like to consider, provided by the likes of NDNA, for example.

Sue Cowley is an educational author, trainer and presenter, and also helps to run her local preschool. Follow her on X at @Sue_Cowley.