Clause 49 - Report of inspections
Childcare Bill
2:45 pm
Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Children, Young People and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
Amendment No. 57 seeks to ensure that parents’ needs are taken into account and reported on in the report that inspectors produce after they complete an inspection. I agree with the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton that to ensure that a particular setting properly meets the needs of children, and that it is delivering the early years foundation stage and adhering to the principles behind it, providers will have to establish good relationships with parents. As we know, parents are the single most important factor, for better or worse, in determining outcomes for children. Therefore, practitioners will need to work with parents to ensure that children’s needs are met.
The hon. Gentleman repeated some of the comments that I made about practitioners and parents building relationships, how that determines and shapes the experience of the child, how the child should be handed over from one adult to another at the beginning of the day and how the child sees that there is a relationship—all of that is important. However, the early years foundation stage is about ensuring that children’s needs are met and that their well-being is promoted. Although the active involvement of parents is integral to that, the early years foundation stage itself is not about meeting parents’ needs, which is how subsection (1)(c) would be phrased with the amendment. I hope that he will accept that the chief inspector should not be required to report on whether parents’ needs are being met, although he will need to report on the extent to which practitioners involve parents in what is going on in the setting and whether relationships between practitioners and parents are strong and sound.
Amendment No. 58 concerns the extent to which the inspector reports on the quality of leadership and management, which is also important. Such reporting will include a number of factors, including staff deployment, morale, planning, organisation and the culture of the setting. Subsection (1)(d) is so worded to capture the variety of factors that could be considered to contribute to the quality of leadership and management. It also ensures that different models of early years provision can be taken into account. For instance, some settings are part of large national organisations, so we must ensure that inspectors can comment not simply on the leaders of individual settings, but on the extent to which any parent organisation, whether a voluntary organisation or a large private provider, is contributing to the quality of what is delivered.
Amendment No. 274 would prevent Ofsted from including a grade or an indication of grading in an inspection report. I disagree with the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole on that. I am sorry that she linked it—unhelpfully—to the idea of league tables, because it is not about league tables. She acknowledged that there is a well developed inspection practice across many fields, including probation, prisons, education and the health sector, and a considerable body of best practice. In none of those instances do inspectors ascribe a single benchmark—a pass or fail standard—as a result of their inspection.
The provision is predominately about parents and information for parents, so it is essential that in education and child care across the board there is a system whereby parents can understand where the setting in which their children are being cared for sits in the quality spectrum. We want everybody, ultimately, to reach the highest standards, but the process of getting there will involve different settings at different points, albeit above a broadly satisfactory standard. Parents must have that information.
The hon. Lady might know that Ofsted publishes its inspection reports on the website, which is very good. The number of visits to that website—more than 17,000 a day—shows the extent of interest in the performance of early years provision and schools by the parents who use them.