In this tutorial we’re going to cover the Cherry Garden framework on Tapestry — an assessment framework developed with Cherry Garden School, a specialist school in the London Borough of Southwark for children aged 2–11 with learning differences.
The framework is made up of 9 areas of learning divided into 24 aspects, and each aspect contains up to ten branches representing developmental levels from roughly 0–5 months up to early Year 1.
We’ll look at enabling and configuring the framework, customising its refinements, adding Cherry Garden assessments to observations, and where to track everything afterwards.
Enabling the Cherry Garden framework
To switch the framework on, click Configuration at the bottom of the menu on the left of your screen, then select Assessments from the panel that opens.
On the Assessment Framework Settings page, scroll down to the United Kingdom group, find Cherry Garden and click Configure.
Do bear in mind that only managers on Tapestry can enable and configure assessment frameworks — see our tutorial on enabling assessment frameworks for more. You’ll also spot Cherry Garden Bridging just below Cherry Garden in the list — that’s a separate framework with its own tutorial.
Configuring the framework
In the window that opens, tick Enable Cherry Garden. You can also choose whether to Display Cherry Garden to relatives — with this ticked, relatives will see Cherry Garden assessments on the observations they view. The tracking screens themselves are only ever visible to staff, whatever you choose here.
Below that are two settings worth understanding before you start assessing:
- Best Fit Threshold — children often work across more than one branch at a time, so this percentage decides when a branch counts as complete when Tapestry works out the child’s best fit level. It’s set to 80% by default.
- Number of refinements — how many steps you’d like within each statement, from 3 to 10.
Please note, if you’d like to use the Cherry Garden Orchard graphic (covered at the end of this tutorial), we recommend keeping 3 refinements enabled.
Customising your refinements
Further down the same window you can customise each refinement: give it a Name, a Short Name of up to four characters (used on charts and tracking screens), and a Colour.
Each refinement needs its own colour, and red and white are kept back for other things.
The order matters too — Refinement 1 is your lowest and the last one is your most secure, so the first and last are labelled (Lowest) and (Highest) to keep you right. When you’re happy, click Submit at the bottom of the window.
Please note, once any Cherry Garden assessment has been made on your account, the number of refinements is locked — you’ll need to contact customer support if you want to change it. It’s well worth settling on your refinements before you start assessing.
Adding Cherry Garden to an observation
Once the framework is enabled, it appears in the assessment picker whenever you write an observation. On the Add Observation page, click + Add Assessments to open the picker.
Select Cherry Garden from the Frameworks list and its nine areas of learning appear alongside — from Communication, Language and Literacy through to Transition.
Click an area to see its aspects, then choose an aspect and pick the Branch you’re assessing against from the dropdown. Tick a statement and a Refinement selector appears beneath it so you can record how securely the child demonstrated it.
Some statements also carry criteria — for example, Uses simple sentences lets you specify whether it was To make a request, To comment or To ask a question. Click Done when you’ve finished and save your observation as usual.
Tracking your data
Everything you record feeds the Cherry Garden tracking screens. Click Planning & Monitoring in the menu on the left, choose Monitoring, and select the Cherry Garden tab.
From here you can open the Baseline, Statements, Strand Scores and Target Setting snapshots, the Progress analysis screens, and the group Monitoring view — each of which we’ll cover in its own tutorial.
The Cherry Garden Orchard
Finally, every child has their own interactive Cherry Garden Orchard — a child-friendly picture of their learning. Click Children in the menu on the left, then open the dropdown next to the child’s name and choose Cherry Garden Orchard.
The orchard draws the child’s learning as a landscape: each signpost is an area of learning, the trees represent the aspects, and tapping branches, leaves and flower petals shows the evidence behind them — with petal sizes reflecting the refinements, which is why we recommend keeping three refinements if you plan to use it.
And that’s it! You now know how to enable and configure the Cherry Garden framework, shape its refinements to suit your setting, record Cherry Garden assessments in observations, and where to find the tracking screens and each child’s orchard.