Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) has also made international comparisons (see Chapter 6), and claims it has gained insights from these comparisons. In June 2023, it published a research and analysis brief entitled ‘International Perspectives on Early Years’. Drawing mainly on the Eurydice data discussed in the previous chapter, and on some of the more recent Starting Strong reports, it organized its ‘insights’ into four themes:

• • availability and access

• • workforce

• • curriculum and pedagogy

• • inspection and regulation

Ofsted discussed its opinions and strategies at a round table meeting with representatives from 13 countries: Belgium, Czechia, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Scotland, Serbia and Sweden. Some of the named representatives are well-known and have a history both with the original OECD Starting Strong programme and its subsequent iterations, and the EU. The discussion was clearly very civilized and well-informed. The difficulty is that Ofsted set the agenda, and the parameters for the discussion were framed by Ofsted in the light of its present – and limited – remit as a centralized national body.

Childcare is regulated through Ofsted. This covers all provision in England, distinguished for inspection purposes into two categories: in-home and out-of-home provision. Similar bodies to Ofsted exist for Scotland and Wales. Ofsted's original remit was to oversee the standards of free public sector education, to replace local authority monitoring and inspection, which was regarded as too variable and, in some cases, too lenient. As the Labour Party started to diversify childcare provision, Ofsted subsequently took on local authority roles in relation to childcare as well, to try to maintain similar standards across the entire sector. Ofsted now includes the inspection of market-based childcare services, most of which are part-subsidized by the government. However, Ofsted still retains its separate schools remit, which covers state-based nursery education, so that the standards for nursery classes refer not to childcare, but to school education more generally. The Ofsted regulatory standards for childcare run to several handbooks, including a suite of health and safety regulations. They prescribe developmental standards, using background research papers to justify these standards.