In this episode, colleagues from the National Day Nurseries Association join Ofsted to discuss the report into the importance of the first two years of a child's life: Getting it right from the start: how early years practitioners work with babies and toddlers - GOV.UK   Briony Balsom  Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of Ofsted Talks. I'm Bryony Balsam, and this time, we're focusing on early years, on 'Getting it right from the start, how early years practitioners work with babies and toddlers.' And indeed, that is the title of our recently released report. So the research explores how early years practitioners understand the Early Years Foundation Stage framework and apply it to the education and care of babies and toddlers. So we're talking up to two years. It draws largely on a series of visits to early years settings, a survey and some inspector focus groups. So joining us today, we have Fiona Bland, who is from the National Day Nurseries Association, Kiran Singh, who's one of Ofsted's Research and Evaluation leads and was involved in writing and producing the report. And we have Wendy Ratcliff, who is Ofsted's lead for early education. Hello, everybody. So Wendy, just to kick us off then, why did we produce the report?  Wendy Ratcliff  Really good question, and there's a bit of history there. So when we were doing our 'Best start in life research review 'series, one of the things that came out from that was that, we're aware that there's very little research out there around babies, around our youngest children. And I think that's you know, that that's really important for us at a time when the government are looking are increasing funding, there'll be more babies in settings from September in in terms of the childcare reforms. The other thing we know that those first two years lay those important foundations for all future learning, and that babies' development just needs to be encouraged, supported, and, you know, monitored by adults. It's so vitally important to get those first two years right.  Briony Balsom  Yeah, so I think the report starts out by saying what we know instinctively to be the case, that those first two years are really crucial to a child's development.  Briony Balsom  Why is it that they're so important? Could you tell us a little bit about what forms in that child in their first two years? Wendy Ratcliff  Yeah, absolutely. So. If we think about we think, well, we think about the EYFS, for example, and we think about those educational programs and the primaries of learning. There's so much that needs to happen. What does happen in those first two years and the importance around you know, personal, social and emotional development, physical development, communication and language, we think of those important interactions, and I think one of the key things for us is making sure we get that balance right between care and education, because whatever we do through those interactions, those routines with the youngest children, children are learning something, and that's really important.  Briony Balsom  Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's because we know it's so important that some of the examples in the report are really so wonderful. So there's a really evocative one of the the practitioner talking about sand in a really glorious way. And you can just feel the engagement with the child. Kiran, I'm going to come to you. Can you tell us a little bit about the methodology and what, what you looked at, who you spoke with to formulate the report?  Kiran Singh  Yeah, yeah, of course. It was really important for us, right from the outset of this project to capture as many voices as we could and really try to be as accessible as we could for the early years sector. And we know that not every nursery could take part. We know that not every practitioner could tell us something. So we tried to, we did a lot of different methods. We first of all, we looked at existing studies and literature on