#928 Family Support Practitioners – ABC Nursery

Closer working relationship with parents.  Much enhanced and smoother transition into school.  Parents are happier to engage with the activities that we are providing for home use.  Staff have a better understanding of the needs of individual children through additional training and FSP support.  Although we have not seen any real difference in attainment, all the children left us with a good level of learning.  What was obvious from the work with the children was their love of learning and their willingness to give new activities a try.  They left us wanting to learn more and focused on the new.

We nominated two staff members to share the role of FSP.

These two practitioners work together to evaluate the service we were providing for our families and make changes to our provision.  They produced literature that went home to parents around the home learning environment.  They organised activities that would support transition.  They were instrumental in looking at ABC own home to pre-school transition and started to carry out home visits.

We would like to have more feedback to gauge the impact of the role of our FSPs. We are planning to provide activities this year that will be sent home and returned so that the FSP can see which children will need additional support when going up to ‘big school’.  Our FSP are also more focused on the HLE and transition from home to pre-school.

IOA funding was used to release staff.  This then enabled us to have a designated members of staff in the role.  In turn meaning that the role was not just piecemeal, but practitioners could fully embrace the role to support the parents and children with in the setting.