As you may know my gorgeous wife is a childminder. A profession that is quite tightly regulated by Governement via OFSTED and quite rightly so.
Every few years and inspector makes a surprise inspection on a convenient day when you said you'll be there. These inspections are all part of making sure that those looking after your children are doing a good job and are safe. I have no issue with that at all.
When you are next driving down the road and see a banner outside a school or nursery saying "OFSTED OUTSTANDING" keep one thing in mind, they are plainly very good at keeping their admin up to date. Sadly it doesn't really reflect on just how good they are at looking after your children.
What it does reflect on is how good they are at saying how good they are in the numerous policies and weekly planning sheets. Thier record keeping and child progress records. Only a small proportion of the judgement has much to do with the institutes's actual ability to do well by your child.
What has driven me to finally write a blog on this after having missed so many. My gorgeous wife is seriously considering leaving the Surrey Childminding Network. Not because of any disagreement or inability, in fact the reverse. Because she is good she is regularly asked to care for children who haven't been so lucky in their circumstances. It's because the Network have 'required' her to do the Surrey Childcare Quality Assurance Scheme. Now even before I get into the QIA Neisha has a lot of paperwork to do as it is. So much so that she no longer has kids Fridays purely to allow her to have time to do the paperwork. For some reason the generators of this paperwork seem to think it can be done while watching the children quietly playing in the corner. A worryingly distant idea of reality or even the desired.
Now Niesha is required to do the QIA or leave the network. The QIA is rather similar to doing another NVQ except that it doesn't carry a nationally recognised qualification but is only valid in Surrey. To get it will be about two year work. For Neisha to be funded to look after children from Surrey's two year old project she needs to get this QIA. So she will have to take the thing to be paid quite a lot less than the going rate to look after local authority funded children. Well that makes perfect sense!
Government requires local authorities to implement a quality assurance scheme, they don't specify the scheme. So Surrey have chosen to source one scheme to cover both Nurseries and childminders. Don't forget, most nurseries have an administrator who would get the job of saying how good they are in a million different ways. Childminder's don't, they have to do this in the spare time. There's not a lot of that after a 12 hour day looking after children. Yes there should be a scheme to ensure that the quality of childcare is up to scratch. How about getting the network staff to write a report. They know the reality of how good the individual childminders are not at how good they are at saying how good they are.
