The way schools share resources is changing. Where once a great activity idea might travel only as far as the staffroom photocopier could carry it, today an outstanding lesson plan, observation sheet or planning template can be shared with a colleague down the corridor or a setting on the other side of the country in moments.
For early years educators in particular, where time is precious and good ideas are gold, digital resource sharing is opening up a richer, more collaborative way of working.
Here’s what’s driving the change, how schools and settings are putting it into practice, and what to be mindful of along the way.
Anyone who has spent time in early years education knows the enormous, often unseen, effort that goes into creating high-quality resources.
The themed activity sheets, the observation templates, the parent letters, the carefully designed continuous provision plans – building these things takes time, creativity and experience. Historically, most of that effort stayed within a single setting.
Digital sharing changes that picture. The same time invested in creating an excellent resource can now benefit many more children, because the resource can travel easily between practitioners and settings.
The shift has been encouraged by the move to cloud-based working, the rise of remote and hybrid arrangements and a growing recognition that no setting needs to reinvent every wheel.
For busy early years teams, this collaborative spirit is a genuine boost.
The range of resources moving between schools and settings is striking. Activity plans linked to learning goals, themed planning documents, parent and carer communications, special event materials, training materials for inductions, transition documents for children moving between settings, and a host of practical day-to-day templates all change hands digitally far more freely than they once did.
There is also a growing trend of sharing reflective materials: observations of practice, ideas for inclusive activities and approaches to supporting particular needs.
These are the kinds of professional conversations that used to happen, if at all, in the rare moments when practitioners could meet face-to-face.
Now they happen continuously through shared documents and online networks, enriching practice across multiple settings at once.
The benefits of digital resource sharing go beyond simply saving time, although time saving alone is a significant gain.
The most experienced practitioners often have a treasure chest of resources built up over years, and digital sharing helps make sure those resources benefit newer colleagues across the profession rather than gathering dust on a single hard drive.
Newer practitioners gain confidence and ideas faster when they can see how more experienced colleagues approach a topic.
Settings supporting children with particular needs benefit from a wider pool of inclusive resources to draw on.
And the profession as a whole moves closer to a kind of shared library of practice, where good ideas spread far beyond the four walls in which they were first developed.
None of this replaces the irreplaceable personal contact between practitioner and child, but it gives the people doing that work better tools to do it with.
In practice, schools and settings are using a mix of tools to share resources digitally. Email and shared cloud folders are the everyday workhorses. Professional networks and dedicated early years communities act as broader meeting places.
For documents that need feedback or input from a group, tools that let multiple people review and comment on the same file are particularly useful.
For example, Adobe Acrobat’s pdf share and review feature lets a practitioner send a single link to colleagues or partner settings, who can open the document in any browser without signing up, downloading software, or even creating an account.
All their comments collect in one place rather than being scattered across email replies, and the person who shared the document can see who has opened it and added feedback.
There is also the option to add a password for sensitive files and to send reminders or deadlines for a response.
For an early years leader sharing a draft policy for staff input, or a setting circulating a transition document to a partner school, that kind of clean, controlled sharing keeps everyone working from the same up-to-date version and avoids the usual confusion of competing email attachments.
Sharing more digitally also brings responsibilities, and early years settings have always been alert to these.
Data protection rules, particularly where information about specific children is involved, must be respected as carefully online as they would be on paper.
Sensible safeguards include using trusted, established tools, controlling who can access shared documents, and avoiding the use of personal data in general resources where it is not strictly necessary.
A useful habit is to distinguish clearly between generic resources, like activity plans or training materials, which can be shared widely, and confidential documents, like child observations or records, which should be handled within secure systems and with strict access controls.
For the former, the convenience of digital sharing is straightforward. For the latter, the safeguards must stay firmly in place, and any tool used should support proper access controls and security.
For all the benefits of digital sharing, the heart of early years work remains gloriously human and physical. The hands-on activities, the messy play, the patient listening, the relationships built through years of consistent care – digital resources support and enable this work; they do not replace it.
The wisest settings use digital sharing to handle the planning, templates, communication and administrative undergrowth that can otherwise consume practitioners’ time and attention.
The freed-up time is then poured back into what only a person can do: the warm, responsive interactions that shape a young child’s early experiences. Used in this spirit, digital tools strengthen rather than dilute the special character of early years education.
Digital sharing is not only changing how schools and settings communicate with one another. It’s also reshaping how they communicate with parents and carers.
Newsletters, learning journey updates, settling-in information and event details all flow far more easily in digital form, reaching families wherever they happen to be and in the moments they have time to read.
This has been a particular boon for engaging working parents who may struggle to attend in-person events, and for keeping in touch with family members who play a key role in a child’s life but live further away.
According to the Department for Education, strong partnerships between early years settings and families are central to supporting children’s development, and accessible communication is a foundation of that partnership.
Digital tools that make sharing information easier, while remaining inclusive of families who prefer paper, support this partnership in genuine and practical ways.
The move towards digital sharing is gradually making early years education a more connected, collaborative profession.
Practitioners are no longer working in isolation, dependent only on the colleagues they happen to share a building with.
They are part of a broader community of peers, learning from one another in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago.
For schools and settings willing to embrace this thoughtfully, with the right safeguards and a clear sense of what should and should not be shared, the rewards are real – richer resources, less duplicated effort, better support for newer colleagues, and a profession that grows stronger together.
In a sector where so much rides on the quality of those crucial early years, that is a development very much worth celebrating.
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