For our inspections from April 2026, we are undertaking a focus area to help us understand more about how services support children’s safety, wellbeing and engagement in their play and learning. This is following on from our activity to reduce incidents of children leaving settings unobserved by staff, including our very successful Keeping children safe - look, think, act campaign.
The focus area should not create additional work for services but will provide a system for inspectors to collate and report on key themes relevant to the issue. The focus area is not intended to cover every aspect of activity that is relevant to the issue of children leaving settings but is designed to enable a specific focus on key areas which are important to meeting children’s needs in early learning and childcare settings.
As part of the focus area, we will also identify any areas of good practice that we may wish to share as part of our report. If we would like to publish any aspect of your practice in our Focus area report, we will speak to you about this and ensure you are happy for us to do so.
There will be no change to the inspection process for services, however we will reference the focus area within the report introduction. Further guidance on the inspection process is available here.
Included within the Focus area will be the following aspects:
• staff deployment
• safety of the physical environment, indoors and outdoors
• the quality of personal plans
• children’s engagement with the experiences provided in their setting
This information will be anonymised and analysed to help inform our future work with services.
We will not be including any inspections that are part of the pilot programme for the new Quality framework.