Martyn Oliver's speech at the Nursery World Business Summit
Sir Martyn Oliver, Ofsted's Chief Inspector, spoke at the 2025 Nursery World Business Summit in London.
Hello, thank you for the invitation to speak to you all today.
Congratulations also to Nursery World on your hundred-year anniversary. That’s a fantastic achievement.
I want to start by also thanking you for the wonderful work you do every day.
We all know how important it is to make sure children get the best start in life.
The early years are when the first building blocks are laid and when we set children on a lifelong journey of learning.
So, thank you again.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you and having a discussion with Catherine, but I just want to take a few minutes to tell you about the changes we’re proposing to how we work with you and other education providers.
If you don’t already know, we’re consulting on a new approach on how we inspect and on how we report.
Our aims
We had several goals in mind as we developed these proposals.
Firstly, and importantly, we want to keep the best of the current framework. The prominence of things like communication and language, what we want children to learn and, of course, how we keep them safe. They will all stay. I hope you agree that these elements have driven ever higher standards and a focus on what really matters in those precious early years.
Secondly, we want to better inform parents and families. And so, we’re proposing a new report card that gives more detailed, more specific, and more nuanced information about the places educating their children, removing those simplistic overall effectiveness grades.
Choosing a nursery is often the first educational choice families make.
And it’s often the choice for which they have the most options to make a decision between.
I believe our new report cards will do more to help them with this decision.
And I believe they will do more to shine a light on the great things you’re doing and what makes your settings unique.
Too often, what makes you remarkable was lost behind a few headline words.
Soon, our proposals suggest that families will be able to see, in more detail, what’s special about you, what you do well and what you’re working on.
Thirdly, we want to put inclusion at the heart of what we do. We’re proposing a new evaluation area looking very specifically at how you support the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. And we’re threading it through every other evaluation area that we look at. Because, and I’ve always said this, I believe if you’re getting it right for the most disadvantaged and vulnerable, you’ll be getting it right for all your children.
But alongside all of that, we want to make life easier and simpler for you.
That’s why we’ve developed our new inspection toolkits for how we inspect. These set out the standards we expect, the standards that you all work to and in many cases beyond, across a range of evaluation areas.
The evaluation areas themselves are, we believe, the core elements that go to make up great provision. And, fundamentally, these are rooted in the regulations and the statutory requirements that you already have to work to in the early years foundation stage – the EYFS. We’re not asking anything new of you, or anything you won’t already be doing.
Tailoring our approach to you
We heard in the Big Listen, last year, that you felt the current framework didn’t fully recognise the uniqueness of early years.
So, the first thing to say is that these toolkits are bespoke to the different types and stages of education. Rather than a one-size-fits-all framework, there’s a toolkit specifically for you, for the early years sector. For nurseries like you and anyone else educating the youngest children.
We’ll then go even further. And we’ll tailor our approach to how you work. We will train our inspectors on how to apply the toolkit in each type of provision – and share this information with you. And we’ll shape our inspection activities to the age and stage of development of the children in your care, and the context in which you’re working. That’s so crucial.
So, for example, your inspection will look different to one at a childminder. This all means we can match our approach to what’s really important to your children and to their families.
And we can take proper consideration of the challenges and the context that you are facing.
Using existing standards
As I’ve mentioned, we have also built the standards in all of our toolkits on the existing requirements for each sector. So, in your case, as I’ve just said, they are based around the requirements set out in the EYFS with the statutory and the regulatory standards at the core.
We want you to be working for your children, not doing things ‘for Ofsted’.
Nothing that we’re looking at should come as a surprise.
We want to see things like:
- safe and supportive environments
- well-designed and delivered curricula
- support and professional development for your staff
- children developing across all the areas of learning
- and a thoughtful combination of explicit teaching, planned and purposeful play, yes, purposeful play, and lots of positive interactions between you and your children
How we recognise that you’re doing these things is also changing. We heard from parents in the Big Listen that a single word summary grade didn’t provide that nuance and a complex picture of a provider that they wanted.
So, we will provide one of 5 grades for a range of evaluation areas. There will be ‘causing concern’ and ‘attention needed’ grades for an area where something isn’t quite good enough, and needs some focus to improve.
But, if you’re meeting the government’s EYFS requirements for the learning, development and care of your children, you will also be meeting the standards for a ‘secure’ grade. And if you are going beyond these standards then you will be working at a ‘strong’ level. Perhaps, you may even have an element of your work that is at our new highest ‘exemplary’ standard.
Your funding
We know that your funding can often be dependent on our grades. So, let me also take this opportunity to reassure you that we are working with the department for education to maintain the continuity in this funding as our approach and our grades change.
And if for any reason we do find something that needs attention, we will return more quickly than ever to check on the improvements you’re making. And that way, you won’t have long periods with an inspection outcome that no longer reflects your provision.
Helping you grow
But if you’re doing well, and you want to grow your business, we want to make sure you’re able to do just that. We want to help the best providers to get more settings registered more quickly. To offer care and education to more children.
But to do this, I know you need to be able to recruit good staff too. And I know that’s really difficult for many of you right now.
We want to make sure more people can enter the sector. We want you to have access to the workforce you need and young children need to have the consistent relationships with fantastic practitioners like you that they deserve.
But I do need to be clear. The answer isn’t lower standards.
Having appropriately qualified staff is important, and Ofsted does have concerns about the government’s new experience-based route. We will work with them to make sure any new routes into the profession continue to meet the high standards that we all want in this room for children.
Next steps
So that’s a quick run through of our proposals, and some of our other current priorities.
I’m happy to answer questions on any and all of that, or anything else you want to ask about.
I’m also delighted that Wendy Ratcliff, our Principal Officer for Early Years Education, is going to join me for the discussion. If you’ve got any really tricky questions, watch how nimbly I pass them over to Wendy. You’ve got me stumped!
What’s more, if we run out of time, Wendy and her colleagues will be running a drop-in zone in the lunch breakout area after the session. So, you can go and ask them anything we don’t get to in this session.
But before all of that, I just want to finish with a plea.
A plea for you all to take part in our consultation. You can find it on our website, and you have until 28th April to participate.
I’m really proud of the proposals we’re making. I think they will be better for you, better for parents, and most importantly, better for children.
But I’m sure they can still be improved. And I’m sure that we need your help for that.
You’re out there every day, making a difference in children’s lives. So please bring that wealth of experience that exists in this room, to bear and help us make the best possible system we can.
Perhaps something is unclear or ambiguous? Perhaps we can do more to recognise the nuances of different types of provision or your unique context and challenges? Or perhaps we need to aim even higher and expect more to make sure all children get that crucial best start in life?
Whatever it is, please don’t miss this opportunity to tell us. You can make a real difference, and we need your help.
So thank you, and let’s get to some questions.