What "expected standard" actually means

Put five grades in a row and people read the middle one as average. Exceptional, strong standard, expected standard, needs attention, urgent improvement. Third of five. In every other grading system anyone has met, third of five is a C.

That reading is wrong, and it will cost you if you let it take hold in your setting or in your parent newsletter. Expected standard is not the middle of a range of acceptable results. It is the line. Everything below it is a failure to meet a requirement. Everything above it is a setting doing more than is required of it.

The scale is not symmetrical

A five-point scale looks balanced. This one is not, and understanding why is the whole thing.

Two grades sit above expected standard. Strong standard says an area is clearly better than required. Exceptional says it is a notable strength, well beyond the expected standard. Both describe settings that have cleared the bar and kept going.

Two grades sit below. Needs attention says the area is below the standard and has to be put right, though it is not judged urgent. Urgent improvement says it falls well below, or puts children at risk, and requires immediate action.

So the scale is not average with two better options and two worse ones. It is one line, with two ways of being above it and two ways of being below it. The line is expected standard.

What "expected" is measuring

The word does a lot of quiet work. What is expected is set by the framework and by the Early Years Foundation Stage requirements, not by what the average nursery in your town happens to do. It does not move with the local average, and it does not get easier in a hard year.

That is why expected standard is not a curve. A setting is not graded against the settings inspected that month. It is graded against the requirement, which is fixed. If every setting in England met it in every area, every setting in England would be at expected standard, and that would be the system working.

Six areas, one line each

A report card grades each inspected area separately: curriculum and teaching, achievement, behaviour and routines, welfare and wellbeing, inclusion, leadership and governance among them. Each is held to the same line.

The practical consequence is that a setting can be above the line in some areas and below it in others on the same report, which is an honest description of most settings and something the old single word could never say. A nursery with exceptional inclusion and needs attention in leadership and governance is not an average nursery. It is a nursery that is unusually good at one thing and has a specific job to do on another.

Saying it out loud to staff

The first time a room leader hears "we got expected standard" they will hear "we got a C", and if nobody corrects that, morale takes an entirely unnecessary hit. This is worth being direct about in the meeting where you share the card.

Something like: the inspector looked at what the framework requires in this area, and found that we do it. Not partly, not mostly. We do it. That is the result the framework is designed to produce for a setting that is running well.

Then separate the celebration from the plan. Areas at expected standard are done and should be maintained, not reworked. Areas above it are worth understanding, because whatever produced them is probably a person or a routine you would want to protect and spread. Areas below it are the plan, and they are the only areas that belong in it.

What it means for parents reading your page

Parents will compare. Some of what they compare will be a report card against a legacy word from a different framework and a different year, which is not a like-for-like comparison at all.

If your card is expected standard across the board, the sentence that does the work is not a defence. It is a statement of fact: Ofsted inspected six areas and found we meet the standard in all of them. A parent who has been told the scale runs from exceptional to urgent improvement can place that, and it will read better than a paragraph explaining why third of five is fine.

Keep the date next to it. A report card from this year says more about the setting a parent's child would actually join than an Outstanding from 2018 does, and most parents will take that point once it is made.

The one thing not to do

Do not set exceptional as the target across the board and treat anything less as failure. Exceptional describes a notable strength, and a setting cannot have six notable strengths by deciding to. Chasing it in every area tends to produce a lot of paper about things that were already working.

Pick the areas where your setting genuinely does something distinctive, and be honest that the rest is meant to be solidly at standard, because at standard is the job.

Little Bees shows the plain meaning of every grade next to the grade itself, so nobody reading a nursery's record has to guess whether the word in front of them is a pass.