We welcome the Department for Education’s announcement that the government are moving ahead with their manifesto commitment to scrap single-word Ofsted judgements for schools, effective immediately, and with a new report card being introduced from September 2025 for all schools, including maintained nursery schools.

The announcement confirms that a parallel change will apply to settings on the early years register at a later date, but timescales have not yet been confirmed.

Early Education Chief Executive, Beatrice Merrick said “We welcome the change, as the current system increases the high stakes nature of inspection, while not doing enough to support settings to raise quality. We look forward to continued discussions with government about the new system of report cards and how to have a system which applies equivalent criteria both to schools and to settings on the early years providers register, and fairly and clearly reports the results. Children should have the right to the same quality of experience in both, despite the complication that Ofsted has a different role as regulator of the latter but not the former.”

DfE have issued the following statement giving more details of the implications for the early years sector:

Effective immediately, Ofsted will no longer provide a single overall grade of effectiveness when inspecting state schools. State schools will still receive the existing sub-judgements across different areas of school life. Early Years provision in maintained schools and academies for children aged 2 and above, and Maintained Nursery Schools are included in this change. 

The government is committed to replacing single headline grades in all the remits that Ofsted inspects in time, including the entirety of the Early Years sector. This will include considering how this impacts CMA inspections. Until this change is made, all early years settings registered on the Early Years Register, including childminders and private, voluntary and independent providers will continue to receive a single headline grade of overall effectiveness alongside the sub judgements. There will also be no change to Childminder Agency (CMA) inspections at this time. Local authorities, should continue to follow the regulations and statutory guidance in regard to quality in their Early Years settings.

We recognise this means different parts of the early years sector are impacted differently during this interim period. The DfE and Ofsted will work in partnership with the sector over the next year to develop alternative inspection and regulation arrangements that maintain a strong focus on quality and standards, whilst responding to feedback on what needs to change. New arrangements will take account of the unique characteristics of the sector but will broadly reflect the report card approach that is being taken for schools.

School registered EY settings can continue to deliver the childcare entitlements as expected. For the childcare entitlements, certain requirements on LAs for the working parent, universal and disadvantaged 2-year-old childcare entitlements are linked to when the effectiveness of provision is rated ‘inadequate’, and for the disadvantaged 2-year-old entitlement ‘requires improvement’.  We are considering whether any amendment is required to the regulations governing the early education and childcare entitlements and plan to provide further information and guidance for Local Authorities by the time any new inspections from September 2024 onwards publish their reports.