Childcare providers looking for a quality assurance scheme should recall the warning on a shop front in the ruins of Pompeii: caveat emptor - 'buyer beware'.
The advice comes from Janine Collishaw, the proprietor of two nurseries in Wiltshire, who has just completed an MBA at Reading University for which she conducted a research project on childcare quality assurance schemes.
She is now planning to write a doctoral thesis on the impact that doing a QA scheme has on practice.
Picking a programme from the more than 60 schemes available has become easier with the launch of the Investors in Children (IiC) award. Previously there were no common standards, so potential buyers faced the prospect of expending considerable effort and several hundred pounds, with little guidance on the merits of the programmes. Now, IiC assesses schemes against criteria, agreed with the sector, providing a benchmark.
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