Promoting improvement in childcare and play services

We have looked at how we can do more to support settings to improve and have introduced quality meetings between inspections, based on the quality of provision in each individual setting.

Our aims

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

What’s changing?

• We will start introducing quality meetings in between inspections on a phased approach later in 2024. We piloted these meetings during 2023 and published an evaluation report.
• 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.