What can Ofsted data actually tell us about early years settings? 

Complaints, concerns, and inspections

All settings providing early education and care for 0-5s must be registered with either Ofsted (who inspects and monitors them), or with a childminder agency (who Ofsted inspects). In practice, the vast majority are registered directly with Ofsted. In 2025, 46,600 providers were on Ofsted’s Early Years Register (EYR), serving 1.29 million 0-5s.

There are many well-publicised issues with Ofsted’s workings, and continuing discussions around whether and when the agency is helpful (or not) to providers, and to parents, carers and children.

This article focuses specifically on the different types of information collected and published by Ofsted, and on what it can and cannot tell us: about the quality of early years provision and of children’s experiences within it, and about the functions of Ofsted itself.

Are 98% of providers really ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’?

Ofsted’s topline statistics say that ‘98% of childcare providers had been judged good or outstanding at their most recent inspection’ – ostensibly suggesting a comfortably high-quality experience for almost all 0-5s. These overall inspection results tend to be given prominence. Judgements following inspection visits are explicitly conveyed to parents and carers.

But digging beneath the topline reveals a more complex picture. Ofsted collects information not only through inspection visits. It also receives concerns and complaints about settings (‘notifications’). It has a duty to process and respond to these events, and it publishes data on them.

Mismatches between inspection judgements, information conveyed to Ofsted through notifications, and what is happening in settings

A special session of the Education Select Committee was convened in early 2026. It responded to recent, shocking instances of extreme criminal abusive behaviour towards children within early years settings: crimes that had not been picked up by Ofsted’s processes. The Committee’s Chair stated that ‘there have been a series of serious cases where there is a clear mismatch between what Ofsted have said about an institution and what has been happening inside that institution’. Ofsted’s deputy director for early years regulatory policy and practice, who is responsible for ‘effective regulation of childcare providers across England,’ said that ‘we had 21,000 notifications in our last reporting year…Our last official statistics said that 98% of our settings were good or outstanding, so there often is a mismatch between a good setting and potentially a notification’.

Data on complaints and concerns

On each individual setting’s page within Ofsted’s website, documentation is published about concerns, complaints and their outcomes – alongside inspection reports. Ofsted explains that these details are published ‘after any type of regulatory activity, if we or the provider have identified a breach of requirements, including if the provider has already taken action to address this. This is to make parents and the public aware of any concerns and action taken at the childcare setting’.

In early 2026 we sent a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Ofsted, asking for a spreadsheet laying out the dates of all published complaints and concerns recorded for each provider nationally. We received this data for the period September 2019 to August 2025. In this article, we use the data to identify providers with notifications, and to begin to explore the nature of complaints and concerns as described in Ofsted’s corresponding online reports.

Up front, it is important to note that as well as Ofsted receiving complaints from the public, providers can self-notify when they are aware internally of a safeguarding issue or breach of regulations. At times such notifications can be a good thing, conveying transparency and processes of self-monitoring and improvement, compared potentially to settings who do not notify for similar events.

We therefore do not identify specific individual settings in this article, not least because there are limits to what we can infer about what is happening in settings from any of the data and reporting available. Instead, we attempt to get a sense of the kind of events that lead to notifications.

By definition, all settings in the dataset provided through the FoI request have at least one complaint or concern: 78% have just one. Spanning 2019-2025, there are a total of 8,876 settings with notifications recorded. Figure 1 shows that 1,381 settings (16%) have two instances recorded, and 531 (6%) have three or more. According to the information provided through the FoI request, 76% of these settings with three or more complaints and concerns remain actively registered with Ofsted and therefore open to children.

Figure 1: Number of published complaints and / or concerns per setting, among those who have any published

What is the content of complaints and concerns?

We combed through the full published reports detailing complaints and concerns for the seven settings in the FoI dataset that: a) have six or more notifications, and b) remain registered. Four others are no longer registered. 

Every one of the seven settings holds a ‘good’ Ofsted judgement. In four of them, the last inspection, where the ‘good’ judgement grade was awarded, took place before the last complaint(s) and / or concern(s). The ‘good’ judgement stands, regardless of the substance of these complaints and concerns.   

A variety of issues are documented in the full notification reports. See Annex for an expanded list.  

Among these seven settings with the most notifications reported, some of the most common issues relate to supervision of children and (under-)staffing: 

• Five of the seven settings recorded this or events equivalent to this: ‘children entered an unsecure part of the premises…out of sight and hearing of staff’ 
• Five of the settings had complaints / concerns recorded regarding ‘staff:child ratios’ 
• Four had notifications regarding the need to ensure ‘children are adequately supervised at all times to ensure their safety’  
• Four had notifications around ensuring, ‘staff are deployed effectively to meet the needs of all children and to help ensure children are not placed at risk’ 

Across the four settings whose last inspection and ‘good’ judgement preceded the most recent notification, issues cover: 

• ‘…procedures for administering any prescribed medication to children…’ 
• ‘…medication [being] stored securely and out of reach of children…’ 
• ‘…hazards within the environment which pose a serious risk to children, such as heavy falling shelves, trailing wires, broken glass and blocked fire exits…’ 
• ensuring, ‘…the manager is capable of fulfilling their role and responsibilities, particularly by identifying and addressing serious weaknesses within the nursery…’ 
• ‘…how to recognise and report inappropriate behaviour from any person working with the children…’ 
• ‘…how staff supervise children at mealtimes…’ 
• ensuring, ‘fresh drinking water and clean cups are available and accessible to all children…’ 
• ‘…safeguarding policies and procedures…’ 

Complaints, concerns, and inspection judgements

We linked data from the FoI response to publicly downloadable data on settings’ inspection dates and judgements. Of the 8,876 settings with notifications recorded from 2019-2025 included in the response, 6,063 were registered and open at December 2025. So, 13% of the 46,599 settings registered at this time had complaints or concerns which have resulted in ‘a breach of relevant regulations or legislation’ over the past six years.

Figure 2 shows data for settings with both a recorded inspection judgement and at least one notified complaint and/or concern. 48% of these settings had a complaint or concern that took place after their most recent inspection. This rises to 58% among those with an ‘outstanding’ inspection judgement.

Ofsted’s guidance specifies: ‘We prioritise inspections and/or inspect more frequently when we receive concerns about a setting and the subsequent risk assessment concludes that an inspection is needed.’ It also explains, however, that timing of inspections will be informed by previous judgements. Until late 2025, guidance stated ‘we will use the previous inspection judgement alongside any other information we hold about a provider to determine the timing of its next inspection’.

This seems congruent with indications in Figure 2 that there is much less chance of a setting judged as ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ having not been inspected since their last notification.

However, Figure 2 also begins to suggest that the timing of inspections for settings with an ‘outstanding’ judgement is less likely to be brought forward than settings judged ‘good.’

It is also important to note that, as the majority of settings hold a ‘good’ judgement, there is a limited extent to which judgements can inform decisions about inspection timing, because there is little variation in them.

Figure 2: Percentage of settings where the last complaint or concern was reported after the last full inspection

What does Ofsted’s data tell us, and what questions remain?

This emphasises, as detailed during Ofsted’s evidence to the Education Select Committee, various ‘mismatches’: between a setting holding an inspection judgement of ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ and notifications of complaints and concerns about the setting; and between the content of inspections and their reports compared to notification reports.

While this article has focussed mainly on how settings with an Ofsted ‘good’ rating receive notifications that seem incompatible with a ‘good quality’ experience for children, it is important to stress that ‘mismatch’ can also occur in reverse. Evidence has long indicated that settings can be scored unfavourably by Ofsted while, in contrast, other ratings of early years quality score them positively.

A number of questions are raised by the data and the content of notification reports discussed here:

• If instances akin to those recorded through complaints and concerns were observed during an inspection – rather than arising through notification – would a setting still receive a ‘good’ grade?
• What does this tell us about the way Ofsted treats and conveys the information gleaned through inspections compared to that gleaned through complaints and concerns?
• What does it tell us about how useful or meaningful inspection grades are, compared to other information about a setting?
• What exactly is Ofsted’s key role as an early years inspectorate – is it currently being fulfilled – and what should it be?

Dr Sara Bonnetti’s blog, published alongside this piece, begins to address this last point: on Ofsted’s role, and possibilities for change.

Alongside the examples above, it contributes to the conversation about what Ofsted’s ‘good’ rating has actually come to mean, and whether the inspectorate fulfils crucial functions to uphold basic and essential safeguarding, regulation, and minimum standards in the early years.

Ofsted has very recently moved away from the one-word overriding judgements discussed here. But there are no indications, so far as we are aware, that this will meaningfully change the status of historical, ‘most recent’ judgements, which will presumably continue to stand until reinspection. Additionally, it is not yet clear whether and how other information gathered by Ofsted through notifications of complaints and concerns will interplay in the future with information gathered through inspection.

In the meantime, it is likely that for a substantial number of early years settings, data on inspection judgements will continue to fail to convey an adequate sense of what is really happening within. They will convey little about quality, about issues within settings, and about children’s experiences of early education and care.

Additional information

This piece focusses solely on data for providers on the Early Years Register, which are in the private, voluntary and independent sector. School nurseries and local authority maintained nursery schools also provide early education and care for 0-5s but we do not include them here.