Castro Kemp, Susana;
Peter, Kemp;
(2025)
Ofsted inspection reports in early childhood education settings narrowly focussed: A corpus and sentiment analysis.
Journal of Early Childhood Research
10.1177/1476718X241306859.
(In press).
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Abstract
High-quality early childhood education is key for children’s positive and long-term outcomes. Countries differ on how they quality assure provision. In England, Ofsted is the independent inspection body, often the source of controversy for lack of transparency in ratings. However, there is a dearth of evidence on how inspectors’ judgements are made, particularly in the early years sector. This study examines the consistency and nature of individual judgements in Ofsted reports, through an in-depth corpus analysis of inspection reports for non-domestic early years providers (nurseries and preschools) in England. It is the first to analyse the extent to which inspections focus on well-regarded understandings of highquality early childhood pedagogy and provides an appraisal of the affective tone of the reports, using sentiment analysis. Results show that inspectors are fairly consistent, with similar high frequent terms present across reports, but the inspection focus may be too limited in scope. There is an over-emphasis on school readiness based on outcomes of older children, without clear references to the participation and engagement of younger children and process variables. A more positive tone in the reports is more frequent in high-quality rated settings, except for the section describing children’s outcomes, the shortest across reports.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ofsted inspection reports in early childhood education settings narrowly focussed: A corpus and sentiment analysis |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1476718X241306859 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X241306859 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The images or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Early childhood education and care, inspection, Ofsted, quality |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Psychology and Human Development |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204240 |
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