About Obsly

What Obsly does

Obsly turns a practitioner's own notes into a properly written EYFS observation — with the Development Matters links already made, each one showing the words from the note that justify it. You already did the observing; it does the writing. It is built for nurseries, preschools and childminders in England, and it is free for one practitioner and up to five children.

How our guides are written and sourced

The guides in this section are written in plain English for the people doing the observing. Where they describe the framework, they are grounded in the Department for Education's Development Matters (updated 4 September 2023), published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and quotations are attributed to it.

We hold to a few rules: statements about the framework are checked against the source; nothing is dressed up as compliance or inspection advice; and we would rather publish a short, honest guide than a long one that overstates what it knows. Where a topic is a matter of law — the statutory framework, safeguarding, ratios — we point to the official guidance rather than paraphrasing it as fact.

Our approach to your data

Privacy is built into the product rather than bolted on. Inside Obsly, a practitioner's notes are sent only when she chooses to create an observation, and she sees exactly what will go first — no children's records leave your setting without that deliberate step.

On this website we use analytics to understand how the site and the product are used, so we can make them better. We keep what we collect to what we genuinely need, and we set out what that is, and the choices you have over it, in our cookie and privacy policy.

Who it's for

Obsly is for the practitioners who do the observing, and for the managers who decide what a setting spends its money on. Either way, the best way to judge whether it helps is to try it — free to start, with no card and no sales call.