Documentation for the child, documentation for the audience

Two purposes wearing the same name, and one of them tends to eat the other.

One kind of documentation exists to inform what happens next. It is messy, provisional, often unflattering, and it is read by the people who work in the room. Another kind exists to be viewed by somebody who was not there, and it is therefore selected, polished, captioned and complete. Both are legitimate. The trouble is that they compete for the same finite hours, and when time is short it is always the second that survives, because the second is the one somebody asks to see. The first quietly disappears, and with it the mechanism that made the practice responsive.

You can watch the substitution happen in the language. Documentation stops being a verb and becomes a noun. Educators start talking about getting their documentation done rather than about what they noticed. Photographs are taken to fill a slot rather than because something happened. The genuine test is simple and worth applying honestly: did anything in the room change as a result of this? If the answer is consistently no, then what is being produced is a display, whatever it is called on the roster.

The way through is not to reject the outward facing version, which has real value in making children's thinking visible and in helping families see what their child is actually doing. The way through is to protect the inward facing version explicitly, to give it time on the roster, to accept that it will never look impressive, and to hold the line when it is squeezed. Obligations around record keeping exist and are set nationally and by state, and the current requirements are the authority on what must be kept. That is a floor, not a description of good practice, and the two should never be confused.