Maggie Smith told a London conference on childcare last week, 'I would expect that your experiences of regulation and inspection in the first six months have been very patchy. It's crucial that you contact us and tell us about any problems. We can't mend what we don't know about.'
She said work on a review of the new national care standards, due to take place in 2003, was starting now and the Department for Education and Skills had just set up a group to collaborate with Ofsted on logging providers'
concerns, particularly about how the standards are being interpreted.
'The biggest problem we will face is whether interpretations are inconsistent. We are not going to get this right overnight,' she said. However, she stressed that consistency was not the same as uniformity.
Delegates attending the conference, 'Children's Nurseries: Continuing the Growth', organised by healthcare consultancy Laing and Buisson, raised concerns about communication problems between providers and the Early Years Directorate, saying that providers found it hard to get through and were sometimes sent the wrong information. Ms Smith said that whereas formerly providers tended to have direct contact with registration and inspection officers, queries were now being dealt with in the first instance by administrative staff in regional offices. Yet many of the local authority administrative staff had not transferred, or had been 'few and far between and low-grade'.
Delegates also expressed concern about delays in processing police checks. Carole Edmond, BUPA's head of childcare, said, 'BUPA's been pleased with the way it's gone, but we are really struggling with police checks. This is really challenging us at the moment.'
Ms Smith said the Early Years Directorate had a service level agreement with the new Criminal Records Bureau, which comes into operation in March, to turn police checks around in three weeks. But she also pointed out that there could be problems during the first few months of the changeover from police authorities to the Bureau.
