What is a Key person?
Key Person ensures that your child’s needs are recognised during their attendance and they provide your child with reassurance, safety, and care and respond sensitively to their feelings, ideas, and behaviour.
What does a Key person do?
Each child is allocated a Key Person. The key person will support your child initially with settling into their key group and then continue to support and build up a relationship with the child. Your child’s keyperson ensures that your child’s needs are recognised during their time at Willows. Their role is to form a close bond with your child build positive relationships with their parents/families/carers and ensure strong collaboration is built together. We use strategies to ensure that all parents can contribute to their child’s learning and development.
Identifying a key person for each child will ensure that each child’s care is tailored to meet their individual needs and continuously observe and plan for their learning and development. The Keyperson also supports with:
- Life transitions and is instrumental in building on maintaining your child’s confidence and well-being.
- Providing reassurance and comfort when children are in new situations or feeling unwell or unsettled
• Responsible for finding out about their key child and continually being updated on this information
• Prepare the next steps for their key child’s learning journey and write developmental and progress records such as the 2 yr old report for example
• Provide regular information for parents/carers about activities undertaken by their child, for example, through wall displays, photographs and examples of children’s work.
• Plan activities which include your child’s development needs
• Undertake one-to-one meetings with you about your child’s progress
- Ensure the holistic identity of your child’s needs are met such as their culture, language and religion
- Monitor your child’s progress and encourage you to participate in their development
• Provide a handover to a second person (buddy) when not available themselves
What are the benefits of my child having a Key Person?
Although we allocate a Key Person for each child, they are not the only Teacher who will interact and care for your child, as we ensure all members of the team knows your child well. We allocate a key person to ensure that your child’s development is recorded, their progress monitored, and all their specific development and emotional needs are met through the individual, planning process. Our approach ensures that the child has secure attachments to the additional staff in their room, in relation to their Keyperson and they are confident and secure in their care and environment throughout the day.
Do I keep the same Keyperson throughout my child’s time at Willows?
When your child changes key group, their Key Person will also change. The transition process will ensure that the in-depth knowledge and understanding of your child is passed on. In addition, your child’s Key person will ensure that your child transitions effectively to the next key group and that they are familiar with their new environment and routine. If your child’s Key Person is absent on holiday, for example, the key buddy takes over the care of your child.
How can I support the Keyperson system?
We encourage parents to support and share information about their children’s learning and development at home and the key Person seeks to engage parents in guiding their child’s development at home too. Active learning and partnership are paramount, such as attending the bi-annual parent workshops and parent meetings. Engagement with sharing information via Famly is significant in the learning process. The Key Person system ensures all practitioners use effective, targeted strategies and interventions to support learning that match most children’s individual needs.
