Well, Nursery World, as ever, has been paying close attention and reporting on all the important facts and figures, as you can see from this week's news pages. Unfortunately, not all the figures that we should have are available, with Ofsted's quarterly statistics on the number of childcare providers and places appearing minus the data on places (see News, page 3).
This follows May's hiatus, when the figures showed the number of childcare places zooming up despite the number of providers falling sharply - unlikely, as we pointed out at the time.
Now it appears that Ofsted is acknowledging that the data on places is unreliable and may include duplication across the different registers. Nearly a year after the new inspection system was introduced, these problems really ought to have been sorted out.
Ofsted is able to provide very precise figures for the gradings achieved by every provider inspected since September 2008, though. It's interesting to see that working in partnership with parents and others comes out as a particular strength - an aspect that many settings would not have been at all confident about a few years ago.
Another anomaly is the grading of 'satisfactory', which increasingly seems to mean the exact opposite. Even the Government has decided that funding for free places for two-year-olds will only go to 'outstanding' and 'good' settings. Some clarification or a new name would be welcome.