Please note this rating only applies to our Home Nursery service.
| Overall inspection judgement | Effective |
| Leadership and management | Effective |
| The quality of the agency’s services | Effective |
| The impact of the agency’s services on the quality of the education and care provided by its childminders | Effective |
| Previous overall inspection judgement | N/A |
What does this mean?
Unlike direct childcare providers, Ofsted registered childminder agencies like Koru Kids only get a pass (Effective) or fail (Ineffective) grade at their Ofsted inspections.
Which means our Home Nursery service passed – yay! Please note this grading is only for our Home Nursery service.
We wish there were more levels than just Effective/Ineffective – since our report was so positive, we’re confident we would have achieved very highly if so.
Ofsted’s inspection is incredibly rigorous because it’s so important we’re able to provide good quality care for the children in our Early Educators’ settings and their families, and that we’re able to support and encourage our Early Educators while they’re working with us.
The inspection takes place over three days by a team of Early Years Senior Officers and Early Years Regulatory Inspectors where inspectors speak to our leadership team, our staff, and check our documentation. The inspection team also carried out visits to Early Educators, observed their practice, observed a training session and spoke with a number of parents.
The report is so detailed, with so many positive things to say, so we’ve highlighted some key takeaways from the report below.
You can read more about what Ofsted inspectors are looking for when they inspect agencies like us, what some of the terminology means, and more detail about the ‘Effective’ vs ‘Ineffective’ grading on the Ofsted website.
Key takeaways
Ofsted had lots of positive things to say about our team, our Early Educators and the care and support we give families.
Overall, they found that we have a well-organised and collaborative organisational structure, which means we’re able to provide high-quality training and support to our Early Educators that they feel supported and empowered to create strong bonds with the children they care for.
Here’s some of the fantastic things Ofsted said about us
Parents say that their children are excited to attend the settings. Inspectors’ observations of practice show that early educators know the children well and that children are happy, confident and settled with them.
[Koru Kids] has a strong leadership team. The members of the team hold a shared commitment to deliver a childminder agency which inspires good-quality childcare for children and families who use the service. This commitment drives the practice of highly skilled professionals working in the agency and the early educators who register.
Staff say that they feel valued and able to contribute their ideas and expertise to the growth of the agency – all staff say that they feel valued, and their well-being is thoughtfully supported.
[Koru Kids] values the views of its early educators and parents. It is dedicated to ensuring that no child attending one of its early educator settings is left behind because of potentially limiting circumstances.
[Koru Kids] encourages early educators and their assistants to make good use of local authority training to support their CPD. The dedicated special educational needs coordinator (SENCo) provides effective guidance and advice to help early educators meet the individual needs of children who may require additional support. Ofsted observed the difference this is making to individual children in the care of early educators.
Early educators are extremely complimentary of the [Koru Kids’] ongoing support. Early Educators … describe the people who work at the agency as ‘amazing’.
[Outdoor learning] training is described as ‘excellent’. It has been instrumental in helping early educators to provide inspired learning and play activities outdoors. Early educators say that the training has opened up a whole new area of outdoor play for them and the children. They say that it has helped them to extend their knowledge and create exciting learning opportunities for the children.
Our learnings
During the inspection and from reading the report, there are a couple of lessons we’ve learned from, which we’ve highlighted below.
- We’ve updated our complaints procedure including creating a complaints log template and dedicated communication channel, plus trained up our frontline teams so they can recognise formal complaints, share our complaints policy (which is already on the website) with customers, and know how to escalate them appropriately and in a timely manner.
- Our on-going business support, particularly around self-assessments, for our Early Educators has greatly improved. We ran a recent webinar which was a big success and we have rolled out guidance for all Early Educators on how to handle their finances including being ready for tax returns.
- During the inspection, we identified the need to make improvements to the makeup of the safeguarding panel, including comprehensive panel training, a clearer audit trail and detailed documentation, all of which has been updated.
We’re so incredibly proud of the team and our fantastic Early Educators for showcasing exactly what’s important to Koru Kids – providing a safe and nurturing environment for families to flourish.
Read the full report
You can read Ofsted’s full report on Koru Kids here.
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