Settling in

New children are admitted gradually over the first few weeks of term. Your child will be allocated a key person who is responsible for helping your child settle in and over seeing them and their development throughout their time at Tachbrook. 

The key person will work closely with you or your child’s carer to ensure that your child makes a secure and happy start in school. We do insist that you or the carer is available to stay with the child in the nursery in the initial stages. This will enable him/her to become familiar with the lay-out of the school and our routines and to build up a relationship with the key person and eventually other staff. Your child will then feel confident about saying “goodbye” to you or the carer. The length of time this takes varies from child to child.

The general procedure is that for the first couple of days or so, you play with your child and the key person makes frequent contact with you both. You and your child will go home at 10.45 or 2.45 for the first couple of days. This is because new children often find it hard to adjust from free play to tidy up time. The key person increases the amount of time they spend with your child, enabling you to withdraw to the entrance hall or staffroom, where you can easily be found if necessary. When your child is happy to say “ goodbye”, you can start leaving the nursery, initially for short periods of 30 minutes or so, gradually building up to the whole session.

We judge that your child is ready for you to start leaving when we see the following developments:

• The child is playing happily with the key person
• The child is happy for the key person to help her/him go to the toilet or to help if she/he has fallen over or there is a difficulty with sharing with another child
• The child is choosing to get involved in nursery activities
• The child has reduced the number of times she/he comes to check in with you

Many children stay happily on their own for the whole session by their second week. But some will take longer because, as you know, each child is an individual. Do not worry if your child takes longer to separate. It is so important that a child feels secure here and confident about saying goodbye to you; without this they will not enjoy themselves, make friends or learn.