Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of publishing records of incidents and fatalities at nurseries.

The department’s priority is to grow high-quality, affordable and flexible education and care for children, whilst ensuring their safety, giving every child the best start of life and delivering on our Plan for Change.

The department is responsible for setting the standards which early years settings such as nurseries must follow, these are set out in the early years foundation stage statutory framework. The department has responsibility for policy on inspection and registration but how it is implemented is for Ofsted to decide and to be held to account by Parliament.

Given the sensitivity and quality of the information around incidents, Ofsted do not publish incident data as routine statistics. However, their annual report and accounts include some national level data on notifications that may relate to incidents. The latest is accessible at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67e575d987cebda7c4ca4cde/31795_Ofsted_Annual_Report_and_Accounts_2023-24_-_Accessible.pdf.

Ofsted can only commit to publishing national headline data about the number of complaints or notifications relating to incidents.