The Early Years Improvement Team

The Early Years Improvement Team supports all childcare and early education settings serving children aged 0 to 5 years.

Our mission is to help these settings deliver high-quality, inclusive early learning experiences while ensuring childcare provision meets local community needs.

Through guidance, resources, and tailored support, we enable early years providers to foster developmentally rich environments where every child can thrive.

Our aims

We aim to support all our providers to:

• Achieve high standards of quality care and early education for all children
• Meet the assessment requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage
• Achieve at least expected standards, in line with Ofsted’s inspection criteria, across all areas of evaluation.

Strategic goals

• Improve outcomes for children - Support all children to achieve a Good Level of Development (GLD) in the EYFS Profile by the end of the Reception year.
• Maintain high-quality provision - Sustain the proportion of early years providers judged Expected Standard, Strong, or Exceptional by Ofsted above the national average.
• Drive rapid improvement where needed - Provide targeted support to providers judged below Expected Standard by Ofsted to enable swift and sustained improvement.
• Support new providers to achieve compliance and quality - Support newly established early years provision to meet statutory and regulatory requirements, ensuring high standards are achieved and maintained from the outset.
• Improve access to high-quality early education - Enable families to access funded early education places in high-quality settings across the county.
• Ensure sufficiency of childcare places - Fulfil the local authority’s statutory duty to secure sufficient childcare places to meet the needs of children and families

What support do we offer?

Our universal offer

• Support available to all early years educators includes:
• Information and signposting to relevant services and guidance
• Access to resources and podcasts to support practice and development
• Early years update briefings delivered six times per year
• Early years essentials programme for new managers
• Termly ‘keeping in touch’ questionnaire, followed by a support call
• A central point of contact for advice and enquiries
• Inspection support to help settings prepare for and respond to Ofsted

Our targeted support

For settings, schools, and childminders requiring additional or bespoke support, we offer:

• Post-inspection support - For providers judged below the expected standard, we offer a bespoke package of support, including:
  action plans and rapid improvement plans
• Targeted visits and support - For settings, schools, and childminders where a concern has been raised, we provide focused visits and tailored support to address identified issues
• Support for expanding provision - Including guidance on Ofsted registration and advice to support the development or extension of provision

Request setting support from the Early Years Improvement Team

Help us keep in touch with you

We hold regular meetings in which we communicate important national and local information and news of interest to the sector. The email addresses we use are those associated with your Ofsted registration. Please ensure that we have your correct contact details and notify educationCYPD@herefordshire.gov.uk of any changes so that we can keep you up to date.