Nursery World - Councils fail to look at bids to register

The new Early Years Directorate has been dismayed to find that some local authorities in England have failed to make any progress on applications by childcare providers for registration received in recent months, a situation which is likely to cause delays for many providers. Maggie Smith, director of the new division of schools inspectorate Ofsted, said last week that staff working through the thousands of boxes of files which had come from local authorities with the transfer of responsibility for regulation on 3 September were coming across a number of application forms which had not been processed.

Maggie Smith, director of the new division of schools inspectorate Ofsted, said last week that staff working through the thousands of boxes of files which had come from local authorities with the transfer of responsibility for regulation on 3 September were coming across a number of application forms which had not been processed.

The Directorate was still in the process of quantifying the scale of the problem, she said. 'We are picking up a number of local authorities not completing registrations and not issuing certificates, even though they've done all the work to register someone. We knew we would have some unfinished registrations. What we didn't anticipate was a bit of a mess. We didn't anticipate that some local authorities have received applications and not even processed basic checks.'

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