If you lead a nursery, the words “Ofsted are calling” can make your stomach flip.
Leaders often tell me they’ve searched things like “nursery prepare Ofsted” or even “nusery prepare ofsted” late at night, just to reassure themselves they haven’t missed anything important.
The good news is that preparing for Ofsted doesn’t have to mean panic, late nights and extra paperwork. With a simple, steady process, you can feel ready – and help your team feel ready too.
In this guide, I’ll walk through how a nursery can prepare for Ofsted in a way that is:
- Calm and realistic
- Focused on children’s experiences
- Helpful for everyday practice, not just the inspection
1. Start with the right question: “What story do we want to tell?”
A lot of Ofsted anxiety comes from feeling you’ll be “caught out” or judged on a bad day.
A more helpful question is:
“If an inspector walked in tomorrow, what honest story would we want to tell about our nursery?”
That story usually has three parts:
- Our context – who we serve, what makes our children and families unique
- Our strengths – what we’re proud of, what staff do well every day
- Our priorities – the areas we’re working on and how we’re improving them
Preparing for Ofsted is really about getting clear on that story and making sure your team understands it too.
2. Use a simple self-evaluation structure (not a 40-page document)
Ofsted expect you to have a realistic view of your own nursery. They don’t demand a particular format, but they do want to see that:
- You know your strengths
- You understand your challenges
- You have a plan to improve
A simple structure you can use is:
- Judge – Where are we now in this area?
- Evidence – What makes us say that?
- Analyse – What’s helping and what’s hindering?
- Plan – What will we do next, and how will we know it’s working?
You can apply this to each key area in the Early Years inspection framework (Ofsted Toolkit), for example:
- Quality of education / curriculum and teaching
- Behaviour, attitudes and personal development
- Safeguarding and welfare
- Leadership and management
You don’t need pages of prose. A half-page summary for each area, following those four headings, will give you a strong, focused self-evaluation.
Tools like iAbacus were built to guide leaders through this visually, but the thinking works in any format.
3. Involve your team early – preparation, not performance
One of the best ways a nursery can prepare for Ofsted is to stop seeing inspection as a performance by the manager, and instead as a shared professional conversation.
Practical ways to involve staff:
- Team discussions: Take one area of the framework at a time in staff meetings. Ask, “Where do we think we are?” and “What’s helping or hindering us?”
- Room-level reflections: Encourage room leaders to keep short, evaluative notes – not long descriptions, but “what’s working well” and “what we want to tweak next”.
- Use real examples: When you talk about your strengths, link them to real children, routines and changes you’ve made. That’s what inspectors will look for in conversations.
When practitioners understand the nursery’s strengths and priorities, they can talk naturally about them on the day. That takes huge pressure off the manager.
4. Get ready for the Ofsted planning call
Another key part of “nursery prepare Ofsted” searches is the planning call. Leaders worry: What will they ask? What should I say?
The call is designed to be a professional discussion, not an interrogation. You’ll usually be asked about:
- Your nursery’s context
- Your self-evaluation and key priorities
- Anything particular you’d like them to know (e.g. recent changes, staffing, local issues)
To prepare:
- Have your self-evaluation summary in front of you (even if it’s just bullet points by area).
- Jot down three main strengths and three current priorities – the ones you genuinely believe matter most.
- Note any recent changes – for example, new curriculum approaches, staffing changes, support for children with SEND, or improvements to the environment.
If you have a clear, simple view of your nursery, the planning call will feel much more like a conversation and much less like a test.
5. On the day: focus on what children are experiencing
On inspection day itself, it’s tempting to rush around trying to “show your best side”. In reality, inspectors are most interested in:
- What children experience across the day
- How well staff understand and implement your curriculum
- How safe and supported children are
- How well leaders know their own setting
So, on the day:
- Stick as closely as possible to your normal routines.
- Remind staff of your curriculum intentions in simple language: what you want children to learn, how you help them learn it, and how you know it’s working.
- Encourage staff to talk about real examples: “This is what this child couldn’t do last term, this is what we did, and here’s what they can do now.”
- Have key documents ready but not scattered – safeguarding, staff training, ratios, key policies.
Your calm leadership is one of the most powerful signals inspectors will see.
6. After the visit: keep the improvement cycle going
Preparing for Ofsted isn’t just about “the day”. The most effective nurseries treat inspection as one point in a longer improvement journey.
After the visit:
- Share the feedback with your team honestly and constructively – including what went well.
- Update your self-evaluation with what you’ve learned.
- Fold any recommendations into your existing improvement plan, rather than starting a brand new one.
- Keep returning to your four questions:
- Where are we now?
- What’s the evidence?
- What’s helping or hindering?
- What will we do next?
This way, you’re always reasonably “Ofsted-ready” because you’re always child-ready and improvement-ready.
7. How iAbacus can support your Ofsted preparation (without more paperwork)
As I said at the start, you don’t need another huge document to prepare for Ofsted. You need a way to:
- See your strengths and priorities at a glance
- Involve your team
- Keep everything in one place
That’s exactly why I created iAbacus – a simple, visual online tool that:
- Builds your self-evaluation and improvement plan around the Ofsted Early Years toolkit
- Guides you through Judge → Evidence → Analyse → Plan
- Lets you and your team see progress over time, bead by bead
If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, I’ve recorded a 10-minute walkthrough of the Early Years toolkit inside iAbacus:
In summary: preparing your nursery for Ofsted, the calm way
To sum up, a nursery can prepare for Ofsted most effectively when:
- Self-evaluation is simple, honest and ongoing
- Staff are involved and informed, not kept in the dark
- The focus stays on children’s real experiences, not on creating a performance
- You have one clear process for judging, evidencing, analysing and planning
You’re already doing the hard work every day with children and families. Preparation is about giving yourself, your team and an inspector a clear window into that work.
If you’d like to talk through how you’re currently preparing for Ofsted and whether iAbacus might help, I’m always happy to have a short, no-obligation conversation.
