Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many Ofsted early years inspectors are employed (a) nationally and (b) in each region.
Ofsted has stated that, at present, it directly employs 106 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) Early Years Inspectors, which is a head count of 108. This is broken down regionally by FTE as follows:
Region | Number of Inspectors (FTE) |
East Midlands | 9.2 |
East of England | 11.6 |
London | 19.8 |
North East, Yorkshire and Humber | 14.7 |
North West | 11.9 |
South East | 17.8 |
South West | 11.0 |
West Midlands | 10.0 |
Until 31 March 2017, early years inspection will also be delivered through contracts with two external inspection service providers, Prospects and Tribal. From 3 April 2017 all early years inspection will be delivered by Ofsted. Ofsted anticipates that it will transfer in a total of 167 people to directly employed inspection roles from these providers. This will be supplemented by an additional 277 contracted inspectors.
This new workforce will be managed centrally for a period of two years and during this time Ofsted plans to transition the central workforce to Ofstedās regional structure.