About four years ago, Emma sat on a Lib Dem party policy working group on early years. One of the issues they identified was the need to raise the quality of training for early years staff, which has a big impact on the benefit to young children. As a way of doing of this they proposed introducing a national register and status for leaders in early years, equivalent to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) for teaching primary and secondary-aged children.

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My first reaction to Brown’s plans announced today for constitutional reform, was to be pleasantly impressed. An end to some elements of the royal prerogative, such as institutionalising Commons votes before going to war, had seemed unavoidable for quite a while. But he went further than that, also ending the Prime Minister’s role in appointing Church of England bishops (you only need to say it to see how ridiculous it is in 2007), and opening up some key appointments to Parliamentary scrutiny. He has a long track record on some of this territory and I am prepared to accept that some of it is founded on genuine belief. And he even talked of ‘a Bill of Rights’ and a written constitution. There was nothing concrete on PR for the House of Commons, but some mood music suggesting it might possibly be on the cards.

But then I realised that we’d been here before. Have a look at this. In late 2003 - about half way through the last Parliament, as we are now in this - Blair suddenly announced that he was going to review the case for PR again. Many of us interpreted it as that Blair wasn’t really interested in doing it, but just wanted to put down a marker as an insurance policy in case he needed the Lib Dems after the next General Election. It was never heard of again, and since the result of the 2005 General Election was quite clear, it never needed to be resurrected.

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I knew that the old days of teachers having to spend months preparing for an Ofsted inspection were gone, to be replaced by a ‘light touch’ inspection at short notice. That seemed very sensible - the effort required just to prepare for the inspection did seem to be rather disproportional to actually teaching.

I got a taste of this in January, when at the governors meeting at Highbury Grove Secondary School, I asked when we were expecting Ofsted again and were told it could be any time now. Within 36 hours they had rung up to say they were coming now, they came two days later, and within a week of me asking the question it was all over. (The school was graded ‘good’ - an amazing success for a school that has made huge strides forward over the last few years.)

But that was nothing to Ofsted Early Years (a different set up to Ofsted, though with the same basic purpose in life), who turned up on the doorstep at Emma’s school and nursery this morning, announcing they were going to conduct an inspection at that very minute. They seem to have spent the day looking around there, but by the early afternoon they had gone again, off to write their report. Apparently they actually get training in how to respond to nurseries’ reaction to them (ie shock!).

Since one of the major complaints of the previous system was that teachers had to spend many months worrying about and preparing for the inspection, I can see some sense in this - but which of the rest of us face a knock on the door at any minute and the announcement of an instant inspection by outsiders - leading to a report which will be taken as the judgement on us by the rest of the world for the next three years?