Excerpts:
This Annual Report presents evidence from inspection and regulatory visits undertaken between September 2010 and August 2011 by the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). We take evidence from inspection activity across the full range of Ofsted's statutory remit, which includes early years and childcare, provision for education and skills in schools, colleges and adult learning, children's social care and local authority services for children.
The report draws upon the findings of both routine inspection visits and our programme of survey inspections through which we collect information about subjects and specific aspects of provision in children's social care, education and skills.
...
Childcare: an improving sector, now starting to grow
We carry out a large number of inspections of childcare: over 11,000 inspections of childminders and over 7,000 inspections of childcare on non-domestic premises such as nurseries took place this year. This was the third year in which we inspected against the requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage, and the quality of childcare in England has improved over this period. Three years ago just under two thirds of provision was found to be good or better and 5% was inadequate. This year almost three quarters was good or better and 3% was inadequate. One of the drivers of quality is that childcare providers that have been inspected under the Early Years Foundation Stage and have subsequently left the sector are 10 times as likely to have been found inadequate as those who remained in the sector.
Over the previous two years the number of childcare providers fell steadily. This caused public concern that the demands of the Early Years Foundation Stage were driving providers away. However, that trend has stopped during 2010/11. The number of providers in the early years and childcare sector levelled out in the first half of the year and has now begun to increase slightly, reversing the trend seen in recent years of a fall in the numbers of providers.
It is well understood that good-quality childcare can make a big difference to a child's early development. Where it works well, it helps them take the crucial early steps on their journey through achievement at school to security in adulthood. It has therefore been a major concern that in each of the past two years we have found a large difference in the quality of childcare between areas of high and low deprivation. This year, just over three quarters of childminders from the 20% most affluent areas were found to be good or outstanding, but less than two thirds of childminders in the 20% most deprived. The gap is smaller for providers of childcare on non-domestic premises such as nurseries and pre-school provision, where the corresponding figures were 82% and 74%. It is, however, encouraging that this gap has narrowed slightly this year compared with last year, from 19 to 16 percentage points for childminders, and from 12 to eight percentage points for non-domestic settings.
As these figures make clear, nurseries and other providers of childcare on non-domestic premises perform more strongly in terms of their overall inspection results than childminders, and this gap is getting bigger. We can also see from the longer run of inspection results that those providers that are longer established are more likely to be outstanding. For example, those that were registered before September 2007 were more than twice as likely to be outstanding at their most recent inspection as those registered since September 2008.