Hi! And welcome to our discussion forum on self-regulation in early years provision. By now hopefully you will have at least started to work your way through some of the content. This discussion forum is for everyone to share their practice and ask questions. We will do our best to answer questions quickly, but we have day jobs as well so please do bear with us – replies can sometimes take a while (by which we mean a few days)!

There are some rules and guidelines which we expect you to abide by when using this discussion forum, and these are listed below. There are a small number of very strictly enforced rules and breaking these will result in a permanent and irreversible ban, but we will try to keep the discussion as open and free-flowing as possible. If you are unsure whether you should post something, you can always send it to one of us first (although again, you may have to wait a day or two for a reply) but a good rule of thumb is: If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face in a work setting, you shouldn’t say it here.

Thank you for abiding by these rules and guidelines; we look forward to chatting with you!

Mine and Ursula

Rules

Breaking any one of these rules just once can, and usually will, lead to a permanent an irreversible ban at the sole discretion of the forum administrators. You will also lose access to all the Self-Regulation Forum material, and no refunds will be issued. Your continued use of this forum constitutes your acceptance of these terms.

1. Remain respectful of other members at all times

All posts should be professional and courteous. You have every right to disagree with your fellow community members and explain your perspective.

However, you do NOT have the right to attack, degrade, insult, or otherwise belittle them or the quality of this community, either in the open forums or via the private messaging system.

2. Do not post “offensive” posts, links or images

Any material which constitutes defamation, harassment, or abuse is strictly prohibited. Material that is sexually or otherwise obscene, racist, or otherwise overly discriminatory is not permitted on these forums. This includes user pictures and links to external sites. Use common sense while posting. This is a web site for early years provision professionals. Any material that the site administrators feel may be in breach of the laws of England and Wales will be deleted on sight and reported to the relevant authorities without prior warning or comment.

3. No Spam, Advertising or Self-promotion in the forums

These forums define spam as unsolicited advertisement for goods, services and/or other web sites, or posts with little, or completely unrelated content. Do not spam the forums with links to your site or product, or try to self-promote your website, business or forums etc.
Spamming also includes sending private messages to a large number of different users.

DO NOT ASK for other users email addresses or phone numbers: This is deliberately NOT a social network – LinkedIn and Facebook are your friends there.

4. Do not post copyright-infringing material

Providing or asking for information on how to illegally obtain copyrighted materials is forbidden.

Guidelines

These guidelines are mostly basic internet communication etiquette. Contravening guidelines may result in your post being removed, edited or locked, and/or a warning issued at the sole discretions of the moderating team. Repeated breaches of these guidelines may result in a temporary or permanent ban, depending on the severity or persistence of the breaches. Your continued use of this forum constitutes your acceptance of these terms.

1. Stay on-topic

We want this to be a vibrant community, but it is focussed in a particular area. If you want to discuss other areas of early years education, there are more appropriate places to do it. If you want to have a chat about last night’s TV, there are plenty of social networks better equipped for those sorts of discussions!

2. Do not “cross post”

Cross-posting means posting the same topic or question in multiple forums. If you’re not sure which forum to post in, feel free to ask, and if the moderating team feel that it is the wrong place we can move it. If you ask the same thing in three different places your answers will also be in three different places and other users then derive less benefit from it.

3. Use the search box

In order to avoid asking a question which has already been asked and answered, we strongly encourage you to use the search box. If the same topic is repeatedly posted, we reserve the right to lock them with a link to the previous one.

4. Use “descriptive” topic names

Your topic name should be a brief summary of what you want to ask or discuss. Examples of a vague unhelpful topic name would be something like “Help Needed!!!” or “Urgent Question”.

5. Don’t use ALL CAPS

In internet etiquette typing something IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS is considered to be shouting. Please don’t shout!

6. Don’t upload giant images

If you need to upload a picture, please keep it to 1280×720 pixels and no larger. We reserve the right to delete images bigger than this.

7. You can use any colour you like except red

Although we discourage rainbow text, if you need to use it make your point that’s fine. However when moderators edit posts we will often make a note on it in red like this – Edit: Please don’t use all caps – so we ask you to leave red text for moderators. It helps other forum users see when a post has been moderated.