Care Commission Inspection

[Guest]

hi there all,

 

i am hoping some of you can advise me on an issue i have,

 

recently we had an inspection and for quite some time now ive been feeling that the care commission choose who to grade higher based on relationships they may have with the managers or service providers rather than what the nursery is doing for the children,i think this time i have been proved correct.

 

the 2 care commission officers were in recently and during our inspection 1 of the officers accused a staff memeber of doing something they said was wrong,

 

now they advised me about it a week later after they had referred it to social work,so i immediatly was concerned and suspended the staff member pending an investigation.

 

that day i sat until 11 oclock at night viewing our cctv footage which the care commission were not aware we had.

 

there was absolutly no incident at all,in fact the care commission officer was only present in the room with the said staff member for around 6 minutes.

 

because of this incident that she supposedly seen it put a real negative perspective on our inspection and i feel it is totaly wrong.

 

they were picking up on things like at lunch time 2 of the pre school children wanted to play with a fire truck why werent they allowed why did the staff member put it away,to which i replied that they were sitting for lunch if you just allow children to leave the lunch tables to play all the children would just start to leave,then when these children join school in 5 months are they going to be allowed to play with toys during lunch at school, i dont think so.

 

it just constantly seems like they make things up to find faults and the faults are becoming more ridiculous.

another example is that we have all childrens nappies and wipes stored in individual baskets with their name on them on a shelve in the bathroom ,now we are being told they have to be in individual sealed containers for cross contamination,i have never heard such rubbish.

 

i am just at the end of the road with this lot and feel like chucking it in, 5 years of building the nursery up with my wife doing 12-16 hour days 7 days a week and they just constantly talk rubbish.

 

im wondering if we can ask for another inspection pointing out that the incident the care commission officer thought she witnessed was in fact false and it then placed negative thoughts in her mind towards the setting.

 

i am also contemplating complaining as i had to suspend a staff member and put her through hell based on an allegation that was totally false,if we hadnt had the cctv this staff memeber potentially would have been dismissed,i think that is unacceptable.

 

thoughts please many thanks

[mundia]

Hi ggtruedee, welcome to the forum.

 

Are you in Scotland or Northern Ireland by any chance? In which case, there must be a complaints procedure to follow for your inspectorate (which is different from OFSTED).

 

Im not familiar with the Care Commission and as such cannot explain how they might work. Other members may know more, but I would start with their website and their complaints procedure.

 

Good luck with it

[Guest]

we are in scotland,

 

and they are no longer the care commission but the scswis

 

i just feel that it is purley the discretion of the care commission officer as to what is acceptable and what is not,they may have different ways of doing things or had different experiences themselves 20 years ago but childcare moves so fast are they really the best people to be dictating what should be done when some of them have not worked in childcare for a very long time if at all.

 

we were asked to rip down a play frame from the garden that had cost us £700 because a care commision officer said it was borderline dangerous,then 4 months later our care commision officer came out and said in their opinion it was fine,i then watched the curriculum for excellence dvd only to see children playing on a play frame higher and bigger than ours.

 

it just doesnt add up.

[HappyMaz]

I'm sorry that you have had such a negative inspection experience.

 

I'm concerned that an inspector should see something she thought was serious enough to refer to Social Services, yet she chose not to make this referral until a week after the inspection. On this alone I think there is a reason to complain about your inspection. If there is any concern at all about the immediate safety of a child during an inspection, I would expect the inspector to raise this with the registered person at the time. The fact that you can find no evidence of it on the CCTV recordings makes me wonder if she has made some notes during her time in the room and has later wrongly interpreted what she had written. This scenario is bad enough, but if you suspect that this allegation has been made maliciously then really you have no alternative but to complain about this inspector's conduct.

 

Without seeing the inspection report it is difficult to know whether this incident has coloured the inspection outcome - I think if it were me I would list all the criticisms and seek advice and guidance from your early years team to gain their perspective as to whether they are justified. In any case I think you need clear evidence that the inspectors have made unsound judgements and that their thinking was clouded before complaining about this aspect of your inspection and the effect of the alleged incident had on the outcome.

 

Is the issue of children not being allowed to play at lunchtime mentioned in your inspection report? I think there has to be a distinction drawn between inspectors asking questions of practitioners to make them reflect on why they do things, and because there is concern about the quality of the practice within the setting. It is hard to know given that I wasn't present in the room, but if the inspector was concerned about the way the children who wanted to play were being handled by the staff present, or the children were distressed then I would say it was a valid question to ask. If none of these concerns were prompting the question, and you feel the issue has affected your overall inspection outcome then you should complain.

 

Ofsted have a bit on their website about how you can complain about their inspectors - does the Care Commision offer similar guidance? Again, your local early years team should also be able to offer guidance on this.

 

I am curious that the inspectors didn't know you have CCTV throughout your setting though. I thought you had to display warning signs so that the general public are aware when they are being recorded on CCTV systems, but of course I could be wrong.

 

Good luck with whatever you decide to do - it sounds like you've all been through the mill.

[Guest]

hi there,

 

many thanks, yes we do have signs around the nursery to inform people of the cctv but i just dont think they took any notice of them as they are like alarm signage.

 

with regards to the children playing at lunch time they were making reference to the fact that the staff memeber stopped their play and cut short their learning experience, but i told them it was lunch time we cant be expected to just allow children aged 3-5 to freely go back and forth to the table at lunchtime if they wish as when these children goto school in a few months they will not be allowed to do this.

 

children do have free flow snacks in the morning and afternoon but at the last inspection they asked us to look at the dining experience at lunch time to make it a more sociable activity with smaller groups,we done that but now we have been asked why we didnt allow them to play.

 

very confusing