Our new approach to promoting improvement in childcare and play settings

Our aims were:

• to do more to promote improvement in the sector whilst also providing assurance about the quality and safety of settings; and
• to encourage innovation by promoting and sharing examples of effective practice in childcare and play provision.

We know children experience the best outcomes when providers effectively lead the improvement of their own settings. We want to do more to support individual providers to do this, but also want to help achieve improvement across Wales.

What’s changing?

• We will start introducing quality meetings in between inspections on a phased approach later in 2024.
• We previously called these improvement meetings but have decided to name them quality meetings, to capture the broader range of discussions about the quality of the service overall.
• We will also host annual quality conferences to share examples of positive practice and collectively address any common issues across Wales’ childcare and play sector.
• We will also share positive practice stories on the CIW website and social media channels.

We will continue to provide assurance about the quality and safety of settings through our inspections. We will focus on settings which need to do the most to improve and will inspect these more frequently than those who provide ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ outcomes for children.

We will provide more detailed information and guidance about these changes in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, it would be really beneficial for you to consider your quality of care review processes and how effective these are in helping you make improvements at your setting. You can refer to the National Minimum Standard 18 for further information.