Her Majesty's Inspectors Wendy Ratcliff, principal officer early education and Alex Magloire, deputy director, early years regulatory practice, were met with impassioned pleas from nursery providers at NDNA’s annual conference in Coventry last week, who spoke about the ‘culture of fear’ over the inspection process and the need for change.
The NDNA conference took place on Friday, ahead of the launch on Monday of Ofsted's consultation on the complaints process.
Addressing delegates ahead of a presentation on Ofsted’s Best Start in Life, Magloire acknowledged the ‘strong feeling’ around inspections and said, ‘We know all is not well.’
But one delegate pointed out, ‘If senior people at Ofsted are giving the message that all is not well, why have inspections not been paused?’
He added that there’s a ‘culture of fear’ in the sector and questioned why Ofsted has not paused inspections while it ‘tries to make things right, or understand how to make things right’.
Ratcliff said that Ofsted has ‘continued to keep the lines of communication open’.
She added, ‘That’s why we have got Best Start in Life, we are coming around to curriculum roadshows, we are publishing resources on what providers need to know, we are engaged with our stakeholder group which includes NDNA, and we continue to reflect and listen and respond.’
Another delegate asked Ratcliff to explain how inspectors are taught ‘consistency’.
She said, ‘From the outside, there is definitely a lack of consistency between inspectors on the day and therefore all of our experiences are unique.’
Ratcliff said that as well as inspector training, there are also quality assurance processes in terms of ‘making sure that we look at quality improvement’.
She said, ‘We take feedback from events like today into account and feed it back into training processes. There are also two inspector training conferences a year. These are linked to a number of different things, for example, outputs from some of the quality work that we do through our evidence retrieval, through the learning that we find out from complaints, for example. There's a cycle and that informs what we do with our inspectors.
‘We've also got our curriculum unit and the research that's undertaken informs what we do with our inspectors. We then share that information with the sector. And everything that should happen on an inspection is published so that we are open transparent.’
Ratcliff said that if during inspection you feel that something ‘isn't going as you think it should be going’, providers should ‘refer to the inspection handbook and ask the inspector keep those lines of communication open’.
Responding to questions from Nursery World around the level of worry and stress that providers are facing, an Ofsted spokesperson said, ‘We know that inspections can be challenging, so we have continued to talk to early years providers to tackle some of the common misconceptions about inspections and our work. We want the inspection experience to be as constructive as possible for nurseries and childminders. That’s why we are redoubling our efforts to dispel myths and demystify the process through our curriculum roadshows, new research, and resources.’
Ofsted is currently in the process of publishing new research to develop the evidence base about early years education, including curriculum and pedagogy. The first part of the research series is available here: Best start in life: a research review for early years - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Ofsted said it also has a web page which aims to answer the most commonly asked questions about early years inspection and has produced guides for parents on inspection.