Understanding our Ofsted reports
Ofsted changed how it inspects and reports on nurseries in 2025. If you last looked at a nursery report a few years ago, it will look different now.
What changed
Until November 2025, every nursery was given a single word, meant to sum up the whole setting: Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate.
That’s gone. Nurseries now receive a report card instead: separate assessments across seven areas of provision, each with a written explanation of what inspectors found.
Safeguarding is assessed differently from everything else. It isn’t graded. It is either met or not met. There’s no sliding scale and no version of nearly, which we think is exactly right.
The other six areas are each given a grade: Inclusion, Curriculum and Teaching, Achievement, Behaviour, Attitudes and Establishing Routines, Children’s Welfare and Well-being, and Leadership and Governance.
The reason for the change is straightforward. A nursery can be excellent at one thing and have work to do on another, and a single word hid that. A report card shows it.
The six grades
Exceptional: best-in-country practice
Strong standard: better than what’s expected
Expected standard: doing what a good nursery should do, properly
Needs attention: something specific requires improvement
Urgent improvement: serious concerns requiring immediate action
One thing worth knowing about Expected standard.
It reads like a middle mark. It isn’t. Ofsted’s position is that a setting at Expected standard is fully compliant and doing a good job. The standard is what nurseries are meant to reach, not a pass mark to be embarrassed about.
We’d rather explain that than have you read it as average, because a great many good nurseries are going to receive it.
Why our reports don’t all look the same
Inspections happen on a cycle, so not every nursery has been inspected under the new system yet.
Some of our reports carry the old single-word grade from an earlier inspection. Others use the new report card. Both are the most recent inspection of that nursery, and both are published in full.
Over the next few years all of them will move across. Until then, if you’re comparing two of our nurseries and they look different, that’s why. It reflects when each was last inspected, not a difference in what we expect of them.
What a report tells you, and what it doesn’t
An inspection report is worth reading. It’s independent, it’s thorough and it tells you what a trained inspector found on the days they were there.
It’s also a snapshot, and it can be several years old. It won’t tell you what the room sounds like at half past three, whether the manager knows every child’s name or how staff speak to a child who’s upset.
So read the report, and then come and see for yourself. Ask about anything in it, including anything an inspector flagged. We’d rather have that conversation than have you wonder.
OUR REPORTS SECTION
Get in touch
Enquire and the manager at your chosen nursery will call you back the same day.