🌱 What Are Your Plans for the Next Academic Year?
The start of a brand-new academic year is fast approaching — September 2026 is practically waving at us from around the corner. And if you work in early years, nursery, preschool or any education setting, you’ll know this question is coming:
“So… what are your plans for next year?”
The start of a brand-new academic year is fast approaching — September 2026 is practically waving at us from around the corner. And if you work in early years, nursery, preschool or any education setting, you’ll know this question is coming:
“So… what are your plans for next year?”
Cue the mixed emotions. You might feel excited, nervous, overwhelmed, ecstatic, anxious, hopeful… or even sc-cited (that perfect blend of scared and excited we all pretend isn’t real but absolutely is!).
Some of us hear that question and immediately launch into a confident “Well, I’ve already got x-y-z planned!”. Others roll their eyes and mutter “survive” or “please, not more paperwork”. And some of us feel both inspired and overwhelmed at the same time — because planning for a whole academic year is no small task.
If you’ve ever wanted to scream “Great! But where do I even start?!”, you’re not alone.
🌼 Where I Always Started as an Early Years Manager
When I was managing an Early Years setting, this question was my cue to begin our Continuous Development Plan — the backbone of our growth, reflection, and improvement for the year ahead.
And honestly? The best place to start is with reflective questions. These work brilliantly in leadership meetings, team training, staff supervisions, or even informal chats over a cup of tea.
Here are the questions I always used:
What have we achieved in the last year? “What are we proud of?” is often the follow-up that gets people smiling.
How have individual staff progressed? Think confidence, skills, qualifications, wellbeing, teamwork.
What training have we completed? And importantly — where are we with compulsory training?
Where have we struggled? Be honest. This is where the gold is.
What did last year’s cohort teach us? The good, the challenging, the surprising — it all matters.
What do we already know about this year’s cohort? Early insights help shape your environment and planning.
What worked well (and not so well) in our environment? Indoors, outdoors, routines, transitions, resources — everything is up for reflection.
What did our parents say last year? Feedback forms, surveys, passing comments — they’re all valuable.
Once we had reflected, we used our answers to build a clear, purposeful Action Plan for the year ahead.
📝 Creating Your Action Plan
This is where your ideas become real, practical, and achievable. Whether you use a template, a digital planner, or a giant sheet of paper stuck to the staffroom wall, your action plan should be:
Collaborative — created as a team or with trusted colleagues.
Alive — something you refer to in everyday conversations, not a document that gathers dust.
Central to staff supervisions — it keeps everyone aligned and accountable.
Clear on responsibilities — assign tasks so everyone knows their role.
SMART — specific, measurable, accurate, realistic, and time-related.
Your action plan becomes your roadmap. It keeps your team focused, motivated, and connected to shared goals.
🌟 Linking CPD to Your Yearly Planning
If you read our previous blog post, CPD That Changes Practice, you’ll know that meaningful professional development isn’t about ticking boxes — it’s about transforming everyday practice.
Your action plan is the perfect place to embed CPD that actually makes a difference.
Think about:
What training genuinely improved practice last year?
What CPD do staff want this year?
What CPD does your cohort need this year?
How can CPD be woven into your continuous development plan rather than bolted on?
When CPD and action planning work hand-in-hand, your setting grows in a purposeful, sustainable way — and your team feels empowered rather than overwhelmed.
🌱 Final Thoughts
Planning for the next academic year doesn’t have to feel scary or chaotic. Start with reflection, build a clear action plan, and connect your CPD to real practice. Before you know it, you’ll have a roadmap that supports your team, your children, and your setting all year long.
And remember — you don’t have to do it alone. Growing Together Early Years is here to help you grow, reflect, and thrive.
A simple, reflective toolkit for CPD that genuinely changes practice.
Planning CPD shouldn’t feel overwhelming — and it certainly shouldn’t be a tick‑box exercise. This toolkit gives managers a clear, calm structure for planning CPD that is rooted in what children need and what practitioners need to feel confident and consistent.
Inside, you’ll find two beautifully designed templates:
A Setting-Level CPD Planner that helps you identify meaningful priorities, plan learning approaches, and track impact across the year.
An Individual CPD Planner that supports personalised development conversations, strengths-based goal setting, and reflective follow-up.
This toolkit is perfect for managers who want CPD to feel intentional, relational, and achievable. It’s not about filling a calendar — it’s about growing a culture.
Ideal for: nurseries, preschools, childminders with assistants, and early years leaders who want a more thoughtful approach to CPD.
The Action Plan Toolkit from Growing Together Early Years is a practical, nurturing resource designed to help early years practitioners reflect on their practice and plan for meaningful, child‑centred improvement. Created for nurseries, preschools and childminders who value reflective practice, this toolkit supports teams to celebrate achievements, identify challenges, and set clear, purposeful goals for the year ahead.
Built around thoughtful prompts such as “What have we achieved in the last year?” and “Where have we struggled?”, the toolkit encourages honest reflection across key areas including staff development, compulsory training, cohort needs, environment design, routines, transitions and parent feedback. It helps teams understand what last year’s children taught them and what they already know about the cohort joining them next.
With dedicated sections for reviewing indoor and outdoor environments, evaluating resources, and capturing family voice — “Feedback forms, surveys, passing comments – they’re all valuable.” — the toolkit ensures every perspective is considered when shaping your provision.
The final stage transforms reflection into action. Teams are guided to define priorities, assign ownership, identify resources, set deadlines, and agree on success measures. This structured approach supports confident planning and helps settings stay aligned with their vision and values.
Designed to be revisited throughout the year — at the start of a new term, after transitions or whenever your team needs to pause and reconnect — the Action Plan Toolkit is an essential resource for continuous improvement in early years settings.
Why We Are Stepping Up?
You may have noticed our current campaign step up this half-term and join one of the many options of continuous professional development that we offer. Whether that is one of our numerous recordings we now have available, meaning you can listen to them on a day and time that completely suits you. Heck, you can even pause me and come back to it! Did you know that once you have purchased one of your recording packages that download is yours forever? There are no time limits or even limits on how many times you watch it, it is truly yours forever and ever. Or perhaps you want to attend any one of the live events we are putting on this week. Did you know we are doing an incredible 14 live events? This is the week beginning 21st February 2022, we are sorry if this doesn’t coincide with your half-term; but we hope you might still be able to step up with us (on our Suffolk half-term!).
So, why? Good question why is this the week to do more webinars and really take the opportunity to invest in as much continuous professional development as we possibly can. We noticed after a year of doing our online training that we saw an increase of attendance in autumn and spring half-term. We took this as a message your were telling us as a company, we like to do continuous professional development in the half-terms. These have definitely been popular dates. We also appreciate that staffing in the early years sector is hard at the moment, we would even go as far as to say it is becoming a crisis. This makes term dates and training hard to release people during the day, or to exhausting after working so many hours during the day to then think about continuous professional development in the evenings. We really appreciate that we know that managing rotas, covering sickness and the many hats we wear means sometimes we can be to busy for continuous professional development.
As a company we passionately believe in the importance of engaging in training. So we hope this helps you out. By engaging in continuous professional development, it literally does help us to step up. We learn new things, we remember old ideas, we feel refreshed, renewed, we reflect on practise. All of this allows us to step up. To develop our role within our settings, to develop our professional practise and invest in ourselves. And in case you didn’t know it, you are most definitely worth it. So if you want to attend one of our 14 live events, check out what is on below:
Getting the Balance Right Between Continuous Provision and Direct Teaching
The Impact of Covid-19 on Children’s Speech and Language Development
Supporting 2 Year Olds Communication and Language Development
We hope you will join us to step up this half-term.
Pauline
New Year, New Focus
Often this time of the year we find ourselves reflecting on the previous year and vowing to new years resolutions, change and a better year this year…
Often this time of the year we find ourselves reflecting on the previous year and vowing to new years resolutions, change and a better year this year. I will let you into a secret, I have never been very good at new years resolutions, this year I will join the gym or any of those typical resolutions we feel the pressure to make. But when I was an early year’s managers one of the things that I loved to at the end of each new year and beginning of the next was to take the opportunity to reflect. To consider how much we had achieved in the last year, the amazing moments, we have had and what is next for the setting; where do we want to go?
I am sure there are many managers up and down the country thinking about their settings, the challenges of the past years, the achievements and the where next? New year is a fabulous time to refocus to think about developing those plans for the next year that are going to help your setting grow and develop. Carefully considering the intent, why you want to do things in the next year, to support staff development, to support children’s learning and development or to focus on well-being whatever it will be. And also, the implementation how are you going to do this to ensure that you have an impact – you make a difference to your setting.
As a company we can help you to re-focus this new year to support your setting in their journey. We offer audits, hourly consultancy visits and a wide range of face to face or online continuous professional development for staff. Over 2021 it has been incredible to have met so many practitioners face to face and virtually. We are passionate as a company about inspiring practitioners and working closely with you to develop your settings to improve practise to support children and their families. We cannot wait to support more of you as we move in 2022.
We have developed a resource for you a CPD planner that can be purchased here, to help you plan out your CPD for 2022.
Happy New Year!
Pauline