By Christopher
Russell, National Director Education
In this blog post, Chris explains what we'll be doing as part of
our strategy for early years education.
Ofsted strategy
In April 2022, we published our new strategy, which sets out what
we hope to achieve over the next 5 years.
One aspect we’re particularly committed to is to develop what we
know about early years education and to use that knowledge to
raise awareness and promote a better understanding of good early
education and care. Because it's so important for children to
receive good quality education in their formative years, we have
called this part of our strategy ‘The best start in life’.
When we launched the strategy, Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman
said:
Each of us has only one childhood, and it shapes the rest of our
lives. That’s why this strategy has a particular emphasis on
giving all children the best possible start. Our work should help
make sure a child’s earliest experience of education is as good
as it can be. It should also help make sure that children who
need extra help have the right support in place, both within and
outside education.
We know that a good early education sets the foundation for
children’s later success. A good early education:
- enables a strong start at school
- can avoid unnecessary labelling of children with special
educational needs
- increases children’s engagement with school-age education
- reduces poor behaviour.
But not all children get a good early education.
To further develop our understanding of what high-quality early
years learning and development looks like, we're going to focus
research in this area. We’ll share our findings at every stage.
We’ll also use what we learn in our inspector training.
We want our research to be helpful for those working directly
with children, so we’ll also ask early years leaders to tell us
how they’re using it.
Early years research reviews
Over the next year, we’ll publish a 3-part research review that
will focus on the pre-school age-range, from birth to 4 years.
We're publishing the 1st part later this month. It will explain
the current context of early education for children from birth to
4. It will also be the first stage of our investigation into the
factors of a high-quality early education.
The second part of the research review will focus on the 3 prime
areas of learning as set out in the early years foundation
stage. The third part of the review will look at the 4
specific areas of learning.
This 3-part review builds on the research we did for the education inspection
framework (EIF).
Sharing our thinking about inspection and curriculum in
the early years
Since launching the EIF in September 2019, we have delivered many
curriculum roadshows for early years providers and schools and
spoken at many conferences. In all of these, we have highlighted
the importance of communication and language and how we look at
these when inspecting.
The feedback from these events has always been very positive.
People often tell us that the events have been useful and helped
them improve practice at their settings. However, we know that
not everyone is aware of these events or able to attend. So, we
will continue to share this information in a number of ways,
including here, on our YouTube channel or on
SlideShare, as well as on
our website.
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