New registration journey for early years and childcare professionals
As part of the NPQ policy reforms, early year and childcare professionals in England can receive funding for the new NPQ for Early Years Leadership (NPQEYL) if they are on the Early Years register, Childcare register or part of a childminder agency.
This meant that the service needed to change to allow for these users to register and confirm if they should receive DfE funding.
Please note at the time of launch, we had not been able to find users to test with.
Forking users down the right path
If a user answers ‘no’ to working in a school, academy trust or 16 to 19 educational setting once they’ve inputted their details for validation, we now ask if they work in early years or childcare. If they say “no” to this we know they are not likely to be funded and they divert them down the non funded path.
If a user works in early users or childcare, we ask users whether they work in a nursery and what type. We do this because anyone working in a local authority nursery or pre school class that’s part of a school, can be found on GIAS and can be funded for all NPQs. Without being able to test with users, we made the assumption that some of these users will identify working in a school and others won’t, therefore asking them what type of nursery they work in will ensure they complete registration correctly.
If a user is from a state funded nursery, they will follow the same path and land on the same pages as normal school users, however we changed the content to be more nursery focused.
Any user who does not work in a nursery (e.g. a childminder) or works in a private nursery, goes down the ‘Ofsted’ path.
Identifying if a private early years or childcare provider should be funded
Although there are lots of different types of private early years and childcare professions and establishments, for the purpose of funding we only need to know if they were registered on either Early Years register, the Childcare register or part of a childminder agency which are part of the Ofsted register.
As many childminders’ details on the register are redacted, we needed to determine if they were registered and which register they were on through entering a URN.
We assumed for some users understanding and retrieving a URN may not be straightforward, so we added in guidance and a link to the Ofsted public childcare register.
Do you work in early years or childcare?
Do you work in a nursery?
What kind of nursery do you work in?
Where is your nursery? (state-funded/GIAS path)
Choose nursery (state-funded/GIAS path)
Do you or your employer have a URN? (private/Ofsted path)
Enter your or your employer's URN (private/Ofsted path)
