Ofsted should be split in two between education and care, MPs say

A report by the Education Select Committee said that the inspectorate had grown too large to function properly and that education and children’s care should be split into two new inspectorates.

MPs also said that there was an urgent need to reform the Voluntary Childcare Register.

The report called for a new Inspectorate for Education, having responsibility for nurseries, schools, colleges, adult education, teacher training and local authority commissioning of schools. An Inspectorate of Children’s Care should be created to focus entirely on children’s services and care, including children’s homes, adoption services, childminders and CAFCASS.

The report said the two inspectorates should share administrative functions and work closely together, particularly on joint inspections of children’s centres and nurseries.

However, it said they should ‘retain different elements of expertise and separate chief inspectors’.

It added that the Children’s Care Inspectorate should more actively support improvement and quality, particularly because childminders and adoptions agencies, for example, may not have access to the partnership-based improvement model that schools do.

‘The Children’s Care Inspectorate should ensure that its workforce has experienced practitioners who command the respect of social workers and childcare professionals, and who can promote and support improvement as well as regulating for statutory purposes,’ the report said.