Achieving ‘outstanding’ in early years under the new Ofsted Framework

The new framework for inspection of early years provision came into force on 4 November 2013. Practitioners will already be familiar with how inspectors will judge the overall quality and standards of the early years provision by making judgements based on

• how well the provision meets the needs of the range of children who attend
• the contribution of the provision to children’s well-being
• the leadership and management of the early years provision.

However, there have been some changes to the criteria being used to make these judgements.

• There is now a greater emphasis being placed on the quality of teaching and how staff knowledge, qualifications, training and expertise affect their practice and children’s learning and development.
• Children’s safety and safeguarding must be central to everything all practitioners do and all staff should share a sense of responsibility for creating an environment that is welcoming, safe and stimulating.
• Providers must have effective systems for supervision, performance management and continuous professional development of staff, which have a positive impact on teaching and children’s learning and development.

16 steps to achieving ‘outstanding’ status

The following steps outline the key things your early years setting will need to do to achieve an outstanding Ofsted judgement, with the new requirements included in the revised inspection framework highlighted in bold.

1. You consistently achieve very high standards across all aspects of your work with exceptional educational programmes for children of all ages. The quality of teaching is consistently of a very high quality, inspirational and worthy of dissemination to other providers. 

2. You have very high expectations of yourselves and the children. Using your expert knowledge of the areas of learning and a clear understanding of how children learn, you provide rich, varied and imaginative experiences for the children.

3. Your assessment of children of all ages is precise, sharply focused and includes everyone involved in the child’s learning. You will need to show how you use assessment to inform planning to secure timely interventions and support, based on a comprehensive knowledge of every child and their family. 

4. The children attending your provision are well motivated, very eager to join in and consistently demonstrate the characteristics of effective learning. There should be an extremely sharp focus on helping them to acquire communication and language skills, and on supporting their physical, personal, social and emotional development to help all children make rapid improvements in their learning from their starting points, with any gaps closing rapidly. You should ensure that they are exceptionally well prepared for school or the next steps in their learning.

5. You should have in place highly successful strategies to engage all parents in their children’s learning in the setting and at home.

6. All practitioners in your setting must be highly skilled and sensitive in helping children of all ages form secure emotional attachments, and provide a strong base for helping them develop their independence and ability to explore.

7. The children attending your setting demonstrate increasingly high levels of self-control during activities and confidence in social situations. You should be able to provide evidence that they are developing an excellent understanding of how to manage risks and challenges relative to their age.

8. All practitioners in your setting have children’s safety and safeguarding at the centre of everything they do. They effectively support children’s growing understanding of how to keep themselves safe and healthy.

9. All practitioners contribute to creating a highly stimulating environment with child-accessible resources that promote learning and challenge children both in- and outdoors.

10. You have an effective key person system in which the strong skills of all key persons ensure all children are emotionally well prepared for the next stages in their learning. Practitioners skilfully support children’s transitions both within the setting and to other settings and school.

11. In an outstanding setting, leadership will be inspirational. The pursuit of excellence in all of the setting’s activities will be demonstrated by an uncompromising, highly successful and well-documented drive to strongly improve achievement, or maintain the highest levels of achievement, for all children over a sustained period of time.

12. You have an excellent understanding of your responsibility to ensure that your provision meets the safeguarding and welfare, and learning and development requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), and has effective systems to monitor their implementation. You make the most of learning relating to safeguarding and child protection to improve practice.

13. You have in place an astute and targeted programme of professional development, which ensures practitioners are constantly improving their already first-rate understanding and practice. You provide high-quality professional supervision based on consistent and sharply focused evaluations of the impact of practitioners’ practice.

14. The needs of children in your setting are quickly identified and exceptionally well met through highly effective partnerships between the setting, parents, external agencies and other providers.

15. Inspectors will be looking for evidence that there is a shared understanding about, and responsibility for, protecting children. Your practice should consistently reflect the highest aspirations of all children’s safety, well-being and learning. You should enable children to make excellent progress in relation to their starting points and prepare them extremely well for school or the next stage in their learning.

16. To be judged ‘outstanding’, all major aspects of your provision must be at least ‘good’, and ‘outstanding’ in most respects, and all legal requirements must be met.