What to do when Ofsted's register is wrong about your setting

Sooner or later a parent mentions that your address is wrong online, and it turns out to be wrong in several places at once. The old unit number, the name from before you rebranded, an inspection date that does not match the certificate on your wall.

There is a reason it is wrong in several places, and knowing the reason tells you the order to fix it in.

Almost everyone is copying the same source

Ofsted publishes its register of early years providers as open data, under the Open Government Licence. That is what makes a free directory of every setting in England possible, including ours, and it is also why an error travels.

We reproduce Ofsted's register and published inspection outcomes and nothing else. We are not affiliated with Ofsted, we do not edit what their record says, and we do not add a judgement of our own about any setting's quality, compliance or safety. The plain-English explanations of what each grade means are ours, and we say so on the page, because they are not Ofsted's criteria.

The practical consequence for you is that a directory can correct its copy of a fact, but cannot correct the fact. If Ofsted's register says the wrong thing, every downstream copy will keep saying the wrong thing, including any corrected one, at the next refresh.

Fix it at the source first

So the order is: Ofsted first, directories second.

A change of name, address, registration details or registered places has to be made with Ofsted. That is the record; everything else is a copy. Once their register changes, our copy follows on its next refresh, which is usually within a week, and other directories will update on their own schedules.

If you go to the directories first, you will spend a week getting several sites to show something their next automatic update will overwrite.

When the source is right and the copy is wrong

The other case is the one worth telling us about directly. Ofsted's register is correct and our page is not: a stale inspection date, a grade shown against the wrong framework, a page that has not picked up a change you made months ago.

Every page carries a report a problem with this page form. Use it, and say specifically what is wrong. We check our copy against Ofsted's register and either correct it or explain why the page shows what it does, which is sometimes the honest answer, for example where Ofsted's own record still carries the old value.

If you would rather write, email [email protected] with your Ofsted URN, the number at the end of the page's address. It is treated the same way and on the same timescale.

The timescale

You will get an acknowledgement by email when a request arrives. We aim to action requests within five working days, and in every case within one calendar month, which is the period data protection law allows for an objection to processing. A second email goes out when the request has been actioned, saying what was done.

If you would rather not be listed at all

You can ask for a setting's page to be removed, using the same form and choosing to remove it. You do not have to give a reason, though it helps us to know if the page is inaccurate.

What removal does, specifically:

• the page stops being served and returns a permanent "gone" status to search engines, which is the fastest way to have it dropped from results;
• it comes out of our sitemaps and out of the local authority and regional listings on the same day, and any badge the setting had embedded elsewhere stops showing anything about it;
• the removal is recorded with the date, the reason given and who at Little Bees actioned it, and it stays removed. A routine refresh of Ofsted's data never republishes a removed page.

That last point is the one worth checking with any site that offers removal. A takedown that a weekly data import quietly undoes is not a takedown.

What removal does not do is take your setting off Ofsted's public register. That register is not ours, and nothing we do affects it.

The case for leaving it up and claiming it

Removal is the right answer sometimes, particularly if a page is inaccurate and the source will take a while to correct. It is worth weighing against the alternative.

A parent searching for your setting will find something. If it is not a page carrying Ofsted's current record with the date attached, it will be a review site, an out-of-date aggregator, or nothing at all, and nothing at all is not neutral for a business parents are choosing between.

Claiming the page is the middle path. The person who runs a setting can claim it from a link on the page. That gives you an account showing every inspection Ofsted has published for your setting, and a badge you can put on your own website. It does not change what the public page says, because the page is Ofsted's record rather than yours, and a page its subject could rewrite would be worth nothing to the parent reading it.

One thing that will not be on your page

Names. We do not publish the registered person, the nominated individual, directors, or any member of staff, and we do not publish telephone numbers, email addresses or social accounts, whether or not they appear on the register.

That is a deliberate line rather than an oversight. Those details identify individuals at settings that never asked to be listed, and a public directory built from open data should not be the thing that makes a person easier to find.

Little Bees publishes Ofsted's own record with the date it was published, and gives every setting a route to correct it or have the page taken down.