So often we hear about the quality of care from the perspective of professional inspectors; a new initiative from ceeda is raising the profile of parents’ views on childcare quality and helping childcare settings to undertake effective and inclusive consultation.

Dr Jo Verrill, Managing Director of ceeda, says:

“Effective partnerships with parents are built in many ways , mostly involving day to day interactions where knowledge, understanding and information about a child is shared. It is also important to ensure, however, that a systematic approach is taken to assessing parents’ views on the quality of care at regular intervals.”

“The ceeda parent survey is available to all childcare settings and offers a professional approach to obtaining parents’ views, feeding into self-evaluation and business development. We carry out the survey on your behalf and provide you with a confidential survey report, including comparison of your results with the wider sector.”

Ceeda is now able to provide an overview of results coming through from surveys undertaken across the country. Interestingly a third (37%) of parents taking part choose to do so anonymously – emphasizing the need to offer independent feedback channels that parents feel comfortable in using.

Parents report high levels of satisfaction with 93% saying they would recommend their childcare provider to another parent. When asked to rate their overall satisfaction 91% give a rating of eight out of ten or higher.

Detailed feedback is also collected on four core themes: providing a safe and secure environment; providing caring and learning; keeping parents in touch and involved and the timing and flexibility of care. Several questions are asked within each theme and combined to produce overall ratings for the theme.

Levels of satisfaction are high with three out of the four key themes having a sector average of nine or above; timing and flexibility of care has a slightly lower average of 8.83 out of 10.

The overall picture is very positive however some parents are disappointed with certain aspects of provision, giving ratings of less than 7 out of 10 for the timing and flexibility of care (12%) keeping parents in touch and involved (6%) caring and learning (2%) and providing a safe and secure environment (3%).

Spontaneous feedback on what parents’ particularly like and value about their provider focuses on the warm, friendly and caring environments created by staff:

“The staff are really friendly and brilliant at what they do. My daughter loves school because of them”

“Nursery provides a warm and friendly place for both children and parents. Staff know my child very well and cater for his individual needs”

“I like the fact that from the minute I walk into the centre I feel welcome and my children feel safe in their environment”

“Warm, friendly, caring staff and environment. The rnage of activities offered both indoors and outside is extensive and fabulous”

Priorities for improvement centre around better feedback on daily activities and children’s development (9%) improving food (5%) increasing flexibility (5%) and extending opening hours (9%).

When asked to describe, in their own words, any benefits gained by their child parents’ report increased confidence (51%) social skills (48%) gaining a good/rounded start to education (18%) independence (14%) friendships (10%) and speech development (11%) amongst other benefits.

Ceeda aims to collect feedback from over 50,000 parents by April 2010 and will be providing regular snapshots from the survey on-line at www.ceeda.co.uk.

Click here to find out more about the service.