Creche and Nursery Daily Reports: What to Record and What to Send Home

The youngest children in a school produce the most information and the least paperwork. A parent collecting a two year old wants to know three things before bedtime: did she eat, did she sleep, and was she happy. In most nurseries that answer lives on a whiteboard that gets wiped at four o'clock, or in the memory of whichever adult is still on duty at the gate.

Decide what the day sheet is actually for

A daily report is not a smaller version of a termly report. It exists to close the gap between a child who cannot yet describe her own day and a parent who was not there for it. Everything on the sheet should serve that, and anything that does not belong on it belongs somewhere else.

That test removes a lot. Attendance is a register, not a day sheet. Fees are an invoice. Developmental progress is a termly observation. What is left is small, and it is the part parents read.

Six things worth recording

• Feeds. What was offered and how much was taken. “Refused lunch, finished fruit” is more useful than a tick.
• Nappies and toileting. Times and anything unusual. This is the line parents of under threes read first.
• Sleep. When the child went down and when she woke. A parent planning bedtime needs the times, not the duration.
• Mood. One honest sentence. A child who cried at drop off and settled by ten is a different day from one who cried until noon.
• What she did. The activity or theme of the day, in the words a two year old might half repeat at home.
• Anything the parent must act on. Medicine given, a bump, clothes that need replacing in her bag tomorrow.

Six lines is enough for a creche room. Every extra field is a field that gets left blank, and a half filled sheet teaches parents to stop reading it.

Record it during the day, not at four o'clock

The single biggest quality problem with daily reports is that they are written from memory at the end of the day, usually by one person, for twelve children. What comes out is the same four sentences for every child, which parents notice within a week.

The fix is not a better form, it is a sheet that can be written in pieces. The adult who changed the nappy at half past ten should be able to record it at half past ten, on a phone, standing up, in about five seconds. If recording something costs more effort than remembering it, staff will keep remembering it.

Let the assistant write it

In early years rooms the lead teacher is rarely the person doing the recording. In one nursery we set up recently, four rooms were run by six adults, and two of those six were assistants who shared a room rather than leading one. They were the people changing nappies and settling children at nap time, and they were the ones who knew what to write.

Most school software has no way to express that. A class has one teacher field, and everything else is a subject assignment, which a creche does not have. The result is that the adult with the information cannot open the record. Whatever system you use, check that a room can have more than one adult attached to it, and that an assistant can write the day sheet and take the register.

Keep the intimate record out of general view

A day sheet says what a child ate, whether she soiled herself, and how she slept. That is a different class of information from a maths score, and it should not be readable by every member of staff in the school. A secondary school subject teacher has no reason to open a two year old's nappy record.

The termly report is a separate document

Nigerian nurseries increasingly describe themselves as following EYFS, and parents ask about it at admission. Whatever framework the school uses, an early years report is an observation, not a score. A three year old does not have a class position, and printing one next to her name is a promise the school cannot keep.

Build the termly report from the areas the school actually teaches to, record a short written observation against each, and let the daily sheets be the evidence behind it. A term of honest day sheets makes the termly report almost write itself.

Lesson notes should match the book the teacher already uses

Most early years teachers in Nigeria plan from an NERDC plan book, with headings like theme, sub topic, rationale, previous knowledge, and a development table split into teacher activities, pupil activities, and learning points. If your software asks for different headings, every teacher spends her planning time translating instead of planning.

Before rolling anything out, open the plan book a teacher is holding and compare it line by line with the form on the screen. Where they differ, change the form. We have written more about that in our guide to digitising lesson notes without frustrating teachers.

A short checklist before you change anything

• Write down what the rooms record today, including the whiteboard nobody calls a system.
• Cut the day sheet to the lines a parent would act on tonight.
• Check that an assistant, not only the lead teacher, can write it.
• Check who else in the school can read it, and close that down.
• Keep the termly report observational, with no scores and no positions.
• Match the lesson note headings to the plan book already in use.
• Run one room for a week before rolling it out to all of them.

Early years is the part of a school where software is most often an afterthought and most easily useful. The records are short, they are written every day, and the parents read them. Getting those three facts right is most of the work.

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