Early years development sets solid foundation for lifelong learning, performance, behaviour, and wellbeing. Scientists established that newborns start with similar brain structure, but events during sensitive period of child's development help in wiring brain for different abilities (Couperus,2006). Evidence suggests that children that are adequately nurtured and supported socially, emotionally, physically, and intellectually have the tendency of developing multitude of neural connections that would serve them well throughout their life course (Best start,2022), while also laying foundation for mental health in the future (PACEY,2021).
To ensure effective tracking of children's overall development, the Early Year Foundation Stage (EYFS) Framework sets standards for learning, development, and care for children from birth to five. This is meant to help practitioners to demonstrate children's progress in learning and development towards reaching their full potentials.
However, despite the availability of EYFS framework, implementation differs across provisions with less structure and standardization (C4EO,2020). Monitoring is usually done through complicated excel-based solutions with no opportunity for benefitting from analytical power that are offered by digitalised platform. This often led to missed opportunities for early intervention, referral and learning from historical records, with early year practitioner reporting burdensome paperwork, duplication, and inconsistency (EYE,2019). The opportunity for active collaboration with parents and future primary education providers is also lost. To address this challenge, this project proposed a digital platform, TEYAN, that reduces teachers' workload and facilitate appropriate monitoring, tracking and early intervention for adequate development
It would help teachers in effective management of children's wellbeing, while also supporting decision making by:
* Providing benchmarking against early year goals
* Aiding observation capturing and supporting evidence provision
* Providing live progress trackers, including health, wellbeing, developmental, dietary/intolerances, etc.
* Undertaking underlying problem analysis
* Estimating developmental age, including value addition
* Suggesting pathways for early intervention, referral and generating intervention plan
* Generating report, showing strengths, and learning needs
**TEYAN contains five modules that are integrated as a web-based application as follows:**
* User management portal with personalised child's dashboard that is accessible to parents/carers
* Observation evidencing module that supports various data input formats, including documents, audio, video, etc.
* Analytics platform that facilitates (i)RAGs indicators (ii)Underlying problem analysis, (iii)Value addition analysis (iv)Early intervention planning
* Database of nationally and regionally approved referral and intervention programs of activities.
* Report generation module that benchmark child's development against the national goals.