continual professional development for childminders

How much CPD (Continual professional development) should you do? And what will your inspector expect to see if they visit?

The only training you have to do is Safeguarding training as recommended by your Local Safeguarding Board and your Paediatric First Aid. However, if you want to grow and develop your practice CPD is a must, especially if you are aiming at trying to get an decent grade.

The new Early Years Inspection Toolkit mentions the importance of continual improvement in several places. For example in the Leadership and Governance section one of the ‘Expected Standard statements is:

‘Leaders provide regular, relevant and appropriate professional learning and expertise opportunities.’ (Early Years Inspection Toolkit 2025. Page 51.)

From the point of view of the EYFS there is no set amount of CPD hours that you have to do. What is more important and what your Inspector will be wanting to see is see what CPD you are choosing to do and why.

Carefully choosing focused CPD based on your own needs shows that you have evaluated and have a good understanding of your own skills and knowledge and what you need to do next to fill in gaps in your own learning.

It is also really important to think about the impact that your training is having. A short piece of CPD which has a lot of beneficial impact for the children is much better than a long course which does not have much effect on what you do. Think about the last piece of CPD you did. What did you change as a result of that CPD? How did the children benefit?

Here is an example: You evaluate what you know and decide that you would benefit from improving your understanding of how children learn. You source and complete some good CPD on the Characteristics of Effective Learning. As a result of your learning you start to include more activities helping children explore their creative and critical thinking and you design a poster to help explain the characteristics to the children’s parents. As a result the children develop their problem solving skills and are supported with their learning at home too.

Don’t forget, CPD does not have to be formal training courses. As long as you are looking for good quality CPD that has a beneficial effect you can do all sorts of things. Reading this blog counts as a small piece of CPD. The impact? Knowing about the importance of evaluating what what you do and deciding on focused CPD to implement your learning more effectively.

Products that can help:

Self Evaluation Workbooks

This is a new series of special workbooks aimed at childminders, that will help you go through the new Early Years Inspection Toolkit to evaluate your setting and put on place an action plan to help you improve or maintain your existing standards.

Each workbook is broken down into separate sections, each covering one of the new Ofsted inspection judgement standards. Each section breaks down the requirement descriptions from the Early Years Inspection Toolkit into smaller, easy to understand chunks to make you practice easier to evaluate. There is also guidance on every section. This is to help you to understand what might be expected of you in order to meet each inspection standard. There is space for your notes next to each section and an ‘action plan’ template to help you organise your plans for improvement.

self evaluation workbooks

Childminding Best Practice Club

Each month members of the club receive a special ‘toolkit,’ filled with specially designed resources. The toolkit is split into two sections, a ‘My Curriculum’ section containing planning and activities to do with the children and a ‘My Learning Section.’ The ‘My Learning’ section contains a self-evaluation question with a follow-up CPD training module. Each module comes with resources and ideas to help you put your learning into practice and a certificate to print out.

Join the Childminding Best Practice Club AND GET monthly CPD

Understanding the COEL is vital for every childminder. Not only will you be expected to know this information during your Ofsted inspection, it is also a huge benefit to the children you look after if you can help them to acquire the skills in the Early Years that they will need to help them to succeed in school and become learners for life. Here are ten ways childminders can put the COEL into practice.

Help children to learn from mistakes, bounce back and try again

Many children (and adults) are afraid of failure. Many parents are so afraid of failure that they never give their child a chance to fail at a task. At the first sign of difficulty they jump in to rescue their child, to finish the art project for them, to lift them up onto the climbing frame. They are afraid to let their child ‘fail’ or ‘fall’ and in doing so, continually give their child the message that they can’t really be expected to do things by themselves and that if they fail or fall, that would be a terrible thing instead of a normal and positive part of growing up. Childminders can help children learn to embrace failure as something normal when learning new things. To learn from failure instead of being afraid of it and to find new ways to approach a task until they succeed.

2. Encourage children to try new things with a ‘can do’ attitude

playing and exploring for childminders — A small boy climbing a tree

Childminders can encourage children to have a can do attitude about trying new things by praising the ‘process’ rather than the end result. It is more important to encourage the child who is attempting to use scissors for the first time and praise the child who is trying to go across the monkey bars, than to display perfect artwork or cheer the child only once she makes it across the monkey bars.

3. Make children believe that the harder they work, the better they’ll get at the things they do

Hard work should always be rewarded with praise and attention. There are few things that will help children to do well in school as much as a belief in themselves that if they work at something they will ultimately achieve it. I like to put up displays that show the children improving at tasks over time to remind them that success takes time.

4. Reward children who never give up

Give children time to persist at a task that they find challenging so that they can feel the satisfaction of meeting the goals they set for themselves. Make the point of telling parents at collection time what the child was trying, not just what the child succeeded at especially if the task was a challenge for the child.

5. Teach children to love learning

active learning for childminders — Concentrating on the balls

Make it clear to children that ultimately you don’t know all that much. That it’s a big, complicated world and no one person is expected to know the answers to everything. Show them how you look up answers to things you don’t know in books and online. As a childminder, a great way to promote learning is to explore themes with the children, especially themes you may not know much about yourself.

6. Help children to concentrate

Encouraging children to sit still and concentrate on tasks (sometimes ones that are not of their own choosing) is wonderful preparation for school. When a child arrives at school he can either count up to ten blocks, or he can’t. He can either write his name, or he can’t. Those tasks can be taught to him by his teachers. However, he will find any task he has to learn easier if he can make himself concentrate. Encourage and praise children who are concentrating on tasks they have chosen for themselves. And expect all children to join in with structured activities you have set up for them so they can practice and improve their concentration skills.

7. Encourage children to keep on trying when challenges occur

characteristics of effective learning certificate — A special certificate for trying

Successful people don’t give up when challenges occur. They try a different approach to solve the problem. They motivate themselves to get through little setbacks and keep going. You can help children to develop this trait by praising them for keeping on trying at activities, whether or not they succeed at what they were attempting.

8. Teach children to think their way through problems

One of the best ways to teach children to think is to model how you think through things you don’t know and show them how you find the answers. Don’t be afraid to show children that you don’t always get things right first time and sometimes need to take a different approach to learn the answer.

9. Support children to ask questions and think about our world

Children asks lots and lots of questions. Always respect these questions and never give the idea that a child’s question is silly. If they feel they can take a risk by asking questions and that their questions aren’t judged in any way, they will grow to believe that asking questions is the key to unlocking their education.

10. Help children to make links and notice patterns in their experience

creating and thinking critically for childminders — Building a tower

All children need to be able to think and solve problems if they are going to do well in school and life. Thinking up ideas, making links between things, finding out how things are ordered and grouped together, and finding ways to solve problems is what an awful lot of education is about. In the Early Years you can help to teach children HOW to think. A great way to do this is by playing with construction toys, doing cooking projects and by taking regular trips to the same outdoor places.

Do you want to improve your understanding of the Characteristics of Effective Learning?

characteristics of effective learning for childminders

For help putting the Characteristics of Effective Learning into practice including tools, activity ideas, certificates you can give to children, poster and display ideas, CPD worksheets for your setting, examples for your SEF and a setting checklist for the COEL, check out the Characteristics of Effective Learning Pack.

Get the Characteristics of Effective Learning Pack