Clause 60 - Report of inspections
Childcare Bill
9:15 am
Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Children, Young People and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
An automatic cycle applies to situations in which the inspection regime is different, and we have said that reports arising from that cycle must be published. Such circumstances will always lead to inspection reports. In the situation that we are discussing, it might be more appropriate for the chief inspector to respond with a letter to a parent. If concerns were shown to be unfounded, I think that the inspector would take the view that it probably would not be right to post that on a website. We ought to give the chief inspector the flexibility to decide what is and is not appropriate to put in the public domain in response to different kinds of visits.
Ofsted and the chief inspector take their reputations very seriously. The chief inspector will make judgments about what parents and the general public ought to see. The presumption will be that things should generally be published, but in certain circumstances it might be more appropriate to provide the inspection results in a different form. It is right that we should allow the chief inspector that flexibility. That is the reason for the use of “may” instead of “must”.