The report by the adjudicator, Elaine Rassaby, said that between 3 September, when the Directorate officially took over the registration and inspection of daycare in England, and 31 December it had conducted about 12,000 inspection visits to register new providers in England, but that only 3,000 had been completed. During the same period the Directorate had received about 3,000 requests from existing providers to vary their registration. More than 120,000 inspections are planned for its first 18 months of operation.
Since September, parents, carers or members of the public have made about 2,000 complaints to the Directorate about some aspect of the quality of childcare facilities. As a result Ofsted has taken 100 enforcement actions, all of which have been upheld by magistrates' courts.
The report said, 'Some 146 complaints were received about the regulation, registration or inspections of early years settings. Of these, 24 were upheld, 29 partially upheld and 31 were not upheld.' A further 62 are still under investigation. Ms Rassaby said, 'I am advised by Ofsted that most of these complaints relate to regulation, policy and processes, and very few relate to inspections.'
However, Ofsted admitted it has had teething troubles with the creation of England's first-ever national register of childcarers. Denise Hevey, Ofsted's head of early years policy, said, 'We had a few problems putting the information from 150 local authorities together last September - particularly as we were receiving applications during June, July and August. Records of these had to be added to the database retrospectively. Checking and cross-checking data is necessary to create an accurate database.
'In addition, local authorities transferred almost 10,000 pieces of "work in progress". These included applications and requests to vary the conditions of registration so that a childminder could care for more children, for example. This means that a great deal of checking of data is necessary to create an accurate database.'
Ms Hevey said some discrepancies had arisen because local authorities used different categories of providers from those defined in the national standards for under-eights daycare and childminding. She added, 'The new categories are sessional care, full-day care, creches, childminders and out of-school care. An example of a check could concern a playgroup which may have been classified as a nursery by a local authority, but where the hours are clearly part-time. We have to check whether it is a nursery only open in the mornings and is therefore sessional care.
'People need to appreciate the scale of what Ofsted has taken on - 150 different local authorities who kept data on providers in 150 different ways. We will end up with a database of something like 130,000 providers. Even if only 10 per cent are inaccurate, that still affects 13,000 providers. And of course people are still able to apply to be providers of daycare. Although this makes the data cleanse more involved, it would be unacceptable to stop anyone applying while we complete the work.
'We are confident that an accurate database is being established, in spite of the pressures of checking and adding to it.'
