Nursery Ofsted inspections can understandably make you and your team anxious. They aren’t designed to trip you up, your Ofsted inspector should be looking for evidence you have self-reflected and acted on the suggestions made during your last Ofsted inspection.
Early years providers for children aged 2 years and above that are attached to a school setting will be inspected under the School Inspection Handbook. The latest changes to Ofsted inspections also apply to these settings.
Where nurseries and EYFS provisions that aren’t attached to a school are inspected under the latest Early Years Inspection Handbook.
Here’s what you can expect:
Getting the Ofsted call
Nurseries and other EYFS settings will be notified the day before their inspection begins. While schools are notified on a Monday morning before 9:30, nurseries are currently still called before midday the day before.
During the phone call, the Ofsted inspector will ask to speak to the nursery manager. If they are unavailable or not at the setting, they will speak to the next most senior member of the team.
If Ofsted has received a concern through their portal about your setting, an emergency inspection can happen. Minimal warning will be given to give Ofsted a clear picture of how your setting is being run without additional preparation time. This usually only happens following a safeguarding concern, as child welfare and safety are top priorities.
During your Ofsted call, the inspector will ask for contextual information and where to find relevant documents. It is likely they will have already researched your nursery via your website or online presence.
Top Tip: We’d recommend scheduling website information reviews regularly with your leadership team and checking that all required information is on your website.
During your initial call, your setting can request an inspection deferral. This will only be granted under exceptional circumstances. It is not grounds to ask for a deferral if your nursery manager or leadership are unable to be present during your inspection.
The inspector will likely give a list of documents they would like to see during their inspection. These may be additional to the suggested documentation list below. Ofsted is clear to reassure nursery managers and owners they do not expect additional paperwork to be created for their benefit.
In theory, if your nursery has all of your important information in one place (and it is up to date), finding and exporting documents of interest should take a few clicks.
Blossom Tree’s Own Inspection Experience
You may be interested to know that the night before our own inspection, we threw a pizza party! It was more of a celebration of what we had accomplished together as a nursery. This excited and relaxed energy carried into the inspection the next day – which the inspector immediately picked up on.
Ofsted documents to have ready
It is no secret that your Ofsted nursery inspector will need to review certain important documentation during their visit. And you need to be ready. Fiddling around at the eleventh hour to find papers is the last thing you want on the day (and it is avoidable stress).
Sorting documents for the inspection can get a bit confusing and stressful. Our main piece of advice is to prepare these the day before the inspection. Here are the documents that need to be readied according to page 9 of The Early Years Inspection Handbook:
- List of current staff and their qualifications, including in paediatric first aid
- Register/list showing the date of birth of all children on roll and routine staffing arrangements
- List of children present at the setting during the inspection (if not shown on the register)
- Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) records and any other documents summarising the checks on, and the vetting and employment arrangements of, all staff working at the setting
- All logs that record accidents, exclusions, children taken off roll, and incidents of poor behaviour
- All logs of incidents of discrimination, including racist incidents
- Complaints log and/or evidence of any complaints and their resolutions
- Safeguarding and child protection policies
- Fire-safety arrangements and other statutory policies relating to health and safety
- List of any referrals made to the local authority designated person for safeguarding, with brief details of the resolutions
- Details of all children who are open cases to social care/children’s services and for whom there is a multi-agency plan.
Blossom customers are able to find nursery, staff, and child files instantly. Documents can be uploaded to the system for cloud-based storage and quick, stress-free access. Plus you are able to generate formative reports (such as termly/half-termly reports) to make Ofsted inspections less stressful.
Ofsted’s focus when visiting nurseries
Ofsted will want to know how well, as a nursery team, you:
- Know each child’s needs individually
- Are aware of and use the results of the 2-year-old progress check
- Use any Early Years Pupil Premium funding to further child development
- Support and enhance early identification SEND
- Decide your EYFS curriculum and adapt to the needs of the children
- Focus on children being school-ready and how secure they are in all 7 areas of learning and development
- Champion the progress of children from disadvantaged backgrounds
As expected, these topics are heavily represented in our article on common Ofsted themes for nursery managers in 2025.
Ofsted will look for evidence that your practitioners can:
- Communicate effectively with the children
- Interact with and respond to the children’s needs
- Model and scaffold language development
- Engage with story time and reading and telling stories with the children
- Model and join in with song singing, nursery rhymes and other musical games
- Encourage children to share their thoughts and build their vocabulary
- Promote independence and growing confidence
- Work scientifically, including predicting and testing ideas
- Encourage problem-solving skills and exploration through play
- Demonstrate excellent role model skills
- Develop children’s physical development, helping them to identify and respond to their physical needs
- Support children with personal needs like toileting and self-care
- Maintain privacy afforded to children with personal hygiene tasks
Ofsted and EYFS safeguarding
Safeguarding is always the top priority for Ofsted inspectors, Ofsted inspects safeguarding differently in nurseries than schools due to the different handbooks they follow. However, the concepts are aligned.
Under the new Ofsted changes, there will be a separate safeguarding category for inspections. Following the consultation of the changes, the new system will be rolled out from September 2025, with the first inspections under the new framework being November 2025.
How an inspector prepares for the inspection
They will conduct sufficient research on you and your setting. They will pick up information from a variety of sources such as word of mouth, and of course your website.
What types of evidence do they gather?
Inspectors must spend as much time as possible gathering evidence about the quality of care, teaching, and learning. According to the handbook, they will:
- Observe the children at play
- Talk to the children and practitioners about the activities provided
- Talk to parents to gain their views on the quality of care and education provided
- Observe the interactions between practitioners and children
- Gauge children’s levels of understanding and their engagement in learning
- Talk to practitioners about their assessment of what children know and can do and how they are building on it
- Observe care routines and how they are used to support children’s personal development, including the setting’s approach to toilet training
- Evaluate the practitioners’ knowledge of the EYFS curriculum.
How will an inspector decide their judgements?
Based on evidence gathered (and the criteria set out in part 2 of the handbook as set out above) your inspector will put forward a series of grades for your setting in the four areas of inspection.
As single-word judgements have been removed in school settings and will be soon in nurseries. The 5-point scaling system will be the new method of grading a provider. For now, if your setting receives an inspection, you can expect the usual wording of Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate to be used in your report.
Blossom customers are able to provide this evidence easily thanks to the EYFS 2021, available on our platform.
Master learning walks
The temptation can be to showcase only the strengths of your nursery during your learning walk with your inspector. Although, absolutely, you and your team should shout about the areas of strength and significant develop since your last inspection.
Ofsted wants to see nurseries (and schools) and self-reflective. Settings should identify the areas that are in development, what is being done to improve these areas and the projected impact you expect from your efforts.
Preparing by going through common questions Ofsted inspectors ask nursery managers can be a good place to start.
Joint observations
At some point during your inspection, there will come a time for joint observations. This is when the inspector and manager (or assigned leader) will take part in observing activities together. According to the handbook, Joint Observations should enable the inspector to:
- Gain an insight into the effectiveness of the provision’s professional development programme for practitioners
- Learn about the provider’s view of staff’s interactions with children
- See the quality of the implementation of the curriculum/educational programmes
- Consider how effectively the manager supports staff to promote the learning and development of all children.
Insider tip:
What they are mainly looking for is the manager’s ability to recognise anything done well and more importantly anything that needs improving. How well you observe will relate to solutions you put forward to better the nursery and methods you put in place to continue operating at a high standard. This is what your inspector is evaluating.
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