A Review Article: HMI, OFSTED and the Youngest Children in School: Will the New Watchdogs Bark as Well as the Old Ones?

Abstract

The under fives and OFSTED — a cause for concern These two recent publications should alert early years practititioners to a development in the monitoring of educational standards which is cause for grave concern. The new regulatory body, OFSTED, has been established on different lines from those of the old inspection service, and has a somewhat different mandate. We have, in England, been accustomed to an Inspectorate which, in spite of all external pressures to conform, led from a well-informed professional standpoint. Up to the mid-1980s there was broad agreement on educational provision for children between three and five which informed decisions throughout the Local Educational Authorities and which made it possible for a devolved administration such as ours to have coherence and integrity. This broad agreement was one that HMI had helped to form. From the Women Inspectors of the turn of the century to The Education of Children Under Five in 1989 we have had cause to be grateful to the Inspectorate for proclaiming that the under fives has particular needs which must be met in particular ways — that they are not just less efficient infants but nursery-aged children who require nursery education. Now that the common-law of educational practice has been replaced by the fiat of central government we have greater need than ever of those understandings about the education of young children. Yet the new inspection arrangements under OFSTED have replaced the old Inspectorate. Will OFSTED inspectors do the job as well as their predecessors? Much hangs on their capacity to understand the needs of the under-fives and to give voice to their insights. There is cause for grave concern about the current trend of thinking on the education and care of children under the age of compulsory schooling. There is also cause for concern about the overall picture of OFSTED's thinking that we get from the two reports. It is unclear and somewhat hard to reconcile — does this mirror a struggle between opposing views, or a failure to'think through a coherent policy? Does it represent the transition between the old and the new watchdogs? These two reports convey that there is, at best, a lack of clarity about what are the needs of very young children. Sadly, this is not all; it is clear that at some level — perhaps not that of individual HMI, who may be having a struggle to retain even a small degree of professional autonomy — OFSTED has accepted, or been instructed to . accept, that children in reception classes will have very different standards of provision from those of the same age who are in nursery schools, centres and classes. Access and Achievement in Urban Education makes it plain that nursery education offers children a much better chance of educational achievement than any of the available alternatives, however 'rich' Messrs Patten, Squire and Blatch may wish us to believe our present diversity to be. However, the report on standards in reception classes (First Class: the Standards and Quality of Education in Reception Classes) appears to restrict its focus to education before five as a preparation for the National Curriculum.