SIP Update and CI Quality Analysis
The quality of funded early learning and childcare services remains high overall; Of the 2,585 settings delivering funded ELC at 31st July 2024, 87.7% meet the National Standard. This represents a 0.3 percentage point increase from this point last year.
31.3% of funded settings exceed the National Standard (have a minimum grade of 5 or higher). Local Authorities have twice the proportion exceeding the National Standard compared to funded PVI settings (38.2% compared to 19.5%).
In the last 12 months, 753 unique funded settings were inspected and resulted in small net increase of 41 settings meeting the NS (when excluding settings which have been cancelled / removed from partnership during the period).
While the proportion of settings meeting the National Standard remains high, there is some turnover in which settings are contributing to the quality proportions from month to month.
In April 2024, LAs identified 262 settings which were on SIPs representing ~10% of known funded settings. This represented an increase of 73 settings when compared with September 2023.
A larger proportion of PVI settings are on SIPs compared to LA settings (16.2% compared to 6.5%).
90.8% of settings were on SIPs for ‘Care Inspectorate Quality Grades Only’ as a reason. This compares to 5.3% for a reason ‘Other than CI Quality Grades’ only, and 3.8% for both CI Quality Grades AND some other aspect of the National Standard.
An estimated 34% of settings on SIPs have seen an improvement in their minimum grade during the SIP compared to 56% which saw no change, and 9% which saw a decline.
The average number of weeks during which settings had been on SIPs was 50 weeks at April 2024 (with a median of 39 weeks).
Any reference to meeting or not meeting the National Standard in this presentation refers only to the Care Inspectorate quality grades. At this point data on other aspects of the National Standard has not been captured in a complete or consistent way.
The data used in this report comes from the Care Inspectorate Datastore, and the IS Data Collection. Until April 2024, the funded settings list used was that collected by the Scottish Government in the ELC Pre-Census Survey for September 2023. The funded settings list was updated by Local Authorities in the IS Data Collection April 2024. Settings which are registered as cancelled by the Care Inspectorate are removed from the time-series after their cancellation date only. Changes to partnership arrangements which took place before September 2023, or between September 2023 and April 2024 are not known in detail.
Local Authorities were asked to submit a count of settings on Service Improvement Periods (SIPs) in September 2023. In April 2024, settings were asked to confirm which individual settings were still in partnership as well as identify which of these settings were on a SIP.
Note that ‘proportion failing NS’ in this graph means the proportion of settings which have at least one grade less than 4 at a Care Inspectorate inspection.
The proportion of settings on SIPs does not directly correlate with the number of settings failing to meet the CI minimum grade for meeting the National Standard. This plot highlights in orange those Local Authorities which have fewer settings on SIPs than they do settings failing to meet the National Standard. This suggest varying use of SIPs in different Local Authorities.
For the settings identified as being on a SIP in April 2024. The average duration of the SIP at that point was ~50 weeks, with 75% of settings being on a SIP between 21 and 57 weeks.A small number of settings were recorded as being on SIPs for between 4 and 6 years.
A larger proportion of PVI settings are on SIPs compared to LA settings (16.2% compared to 6.5%). It is possible that LAs use a different approach for LA nurseries compared to PVI nurseries when using SIPs which may contribute towards this difference.
Of the 262 settings identified as being on SIPs, only 14 (5.3%) were not as a result of Care Inspectorate quality grades at all.
Published graded inspections which occurred within 2 months of a setting starting a SIP were not counted to allow for time elapsing between inspection and publication of grade. It is assumed that Local Authorities may be notified of a drop in CI grade and subsequently place a setting on a SIP in the period before the latest graded inspection is published.
Nearly 57% of settings on SIPs in April 2024 had no published graded inspection between the SIP start date and the end of April 2024. Nearly 20% of settings on a SIP had more than one published graded inspection during the SIP period reported to the IS.
Since SIP start dates do not necessarily align with published graded inspection dates, a nearest estimate has been determined for the grades held at the start of the SIP. Comparisons were made between a setting’s most recent graded inspection and the minimum grade held in the period three months before, or 12 months after the SIP start date (using the graded inspection closest to the SIP start date reported to the IS). Only 87 (33%) of settings on SIPs had an inspection history which allowed this, of which 30 (34%) saw there minimum grade improve, 49 (56%) saw no change, and 8 (9%) saw their minimum grade decline.
Local Authorities identified 2598 settings delivering funded ELC in April 2024. At 31st July 2585 of these are listed in the Care Inspectorate Datastore.
Of these, 87.7% currently meet the National Standard in terms of Care Inspectorate grades. Among Local Authority settings 91.8% meet the National Standard whereas for Private and Voluntary settings this is 80.7%.
Settings which have a minimum grade of 5 or higher (exceeding the National Standard) are differentiated here from those with a minimum grade of 4. A distinction is also made between those those failing to meet the National Standard on 1 Key Question or more than 1 Key Question. Local Authority nurseries have nearly double the proportion of settings exceeding the National Standard compared to PVI nurseries.
Settings which have a minimum grade of 5 or higher (exceeding the National Standard) are differentiated here from those with a minimum grade of 4. A distinction is also made between those those failing to meet the National Standard on 1 Key Question or more than 1 Key Question. Local Authority nurseries have nearly double the proportion of settings exceeding the National Standard compared to PVI nurseries.
The proportions of settings which meet the National Standard for each individual Key Question are very similar.
There is greater variation for each Key Question when considering the proportion exceeding the National Standard (with a grade of 5 or more). This is lowest for KQ Leadership at 46.9% and highest for KQ Staff Team at 55.4%.
The proportion of all known funded settings which meet the National Standard has seen little change over the last 12 months, though only a fraction of funded nurseries have been inspected in this period. The proportion which have not yet been graded has decreased across the period and currently sits at 1.2% of settings.
The proportion of settings which meet the National Standard has been higher among Local Authority settings compared to Private and Voluntary partners across the period. The trend lines for each category do no suggest that there has been any narrowing/widening of this gap.
The difference between the proportion of settings meeting the National Standard and the proportion of registered places in settings which meet the National Standard is wider for Private settings.
As in previous presentations, there will now be a focus on settings which have recently been inspected. Comparisons have been made between grades given to settings at their recent inspection, with the grades they previously held to observe what the net change to the number of settings meeting the National Standard has been. Inspection instances are grouped into quarterly periods and a single setting may be inspected in more than one quarter.
In the last 12 months, ~29% of currently funded settings (753) were inspected - 40 of which had not been previously inspected.
The following plot, however, includes cancelled settings until the point they are cancelled in order to capture where quality has reduced even if affected settings have been subsequently re-inspected or removed from partnership.
There were an estimated 853 published graded inspection instances of 764 unique settings in the last 12 months. In the quarters commencing Apr ’23, Jan ’24, and Apr ’24 there were more inspection instances where a setting dropped below National Standard status than there were instances where a setting improved to National Standard status. Note that the figures shown provide corrections to the presentation given in April 2024 which under-represented settings with multiple inspections.
If we summarise National Status change figures for the last 12 months there were 155 instances where a setting either dropped below National Standard or was inspected for the first time at below National standard level. There were 171 instances where settings upgraded to National Standard level or were inspected for the first time at National Standard level.
However this includes some settings which have fallen since been registered as cancelled or are no longer in partnership. And some settings are inspected multiple times and are therefore counted multiple times.
If we remove:
This results in a list of 753 unique funded settings being inspected (representing ~29% of known funded settings). Of these, 129 dropped below (or had their first inspection below) the National Standard and 170 increased their grade to (or had their first inspection at or above) the National Standard.
Only these inspection instances which meet the above criteria have been included in the next slides
This plot shows, for the 241 recently inspected settings which did not meet the National Standard, the number which have a grade less than 4 for each key question. Fewer settings did not meet the National Standard for Staff Team compared to the other KQs (53%).
This plot indicates the grade change direction (increase, decrease, or no change) for the 713 settings inspected in the last 12 months which have a previous inspection. Despite a larger number of settings failing the National Standard on Leadership, on the whole there were more settings which increased their Leadership grade than saw this decrease indicating a net improvement. For the Care, Play, and Learning question , a slightly higher proportion of settings saw their grade decrease than saw their grade increase.
For any questions please contact
Mairi-Louise MacDonald, Data and Intelligence Project Officer - mairi.macdonald@improvementservice.org.uk
ELC (Recovery and Delivery) Team, Improvement Service - elc@improvementservice.org.uk