‘It Is Important to Plan to Meet the Care and Learning Needs of All Children’

Criteria 1 It is important for practitioners to identify children’s care and learning needs in a setting, there are many reasons for this. Firstly, is to promote development. Some children develop and learn faster than others and it is partly our responsibility to ensure all children’s needs are cared for no matter what stage of development they are at. We can do this by carrying out observations; these help us to identify the exact learning needs of children. They can show us clearly what stage of development each individual child is at, we would compare each child against milestones for that age and stage of development and then we can begin to plan to meet the learning needs of certain children who are not meeting milestones and also plan to accommodate for those children who are over excelling the milestones. Children will develop better if there are adequate numbers of staff/adults present, taking into account the correct staff ratios for each particular age of children. With more hands on around the setting children will benefit greatly so it is important to plan how many adults/staff should be present for a particular day/activity, by doing so there is a higher chance of meeting all of the children’s needs. For example, in my placement I am in a Primary 1 class where there is a teacher and a classroom assistant. For this age range of children the extra support is extremely important as the children’s care and learning needs are higher than that of a Primary 7 child i.e. toileting, a Primary 1 child would need more assistance than that of a Primary 7 child. So if a teacher is caring for the needs of a child who has had a toileting accident it is important to have a classroom assistant so that the other children are supervised and their needs also met. Practitioners should be aware of current frameworks and legislation and how to meet the requirements of those, so it is important to identify how these aim to meet the care and learning needs of all