Pedagogical Documentation

Official records of children’s progress (summative assessment) are kept at three points in the EYFS: Progress check at the age 2, Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) from September 2021 and Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). These records are legal requirements and guidance is provided on how they are to be completed. As discussed in Chapters 9 and 10, however, formative assessments are also central and ongoing and should be an integral part of the learning and teaching process (DfE, 2017a). In ECEC, however, the collection of information (either for the child or the pedagogical practices) that is not part of the legal requirements of the curriculum framework has a long tradition. This chapter discusses this documentation which differs in nature from the legal records and is characterised by a pedagogical style that allows the reader to authentically share the educational experience. In the contemporary debate, especially since the end of the last century and inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophical approach, all documentation concerning the education process is defined as pedagogical (Dahlberg et al., 1997). Pedagogical documentation is discussed as the recursive cycle of observation, design, action, assessment and of the documentation itself. In this sense, pedagogical documentation relies on specific competencies possessed by practitioners, whose role is to observe and identify the essence of educational experience and to select the aspects that are core to understanding this experience and why it may be considered educational.