Using the KindiCare Rating to identify high quality early childhood education and care services.

Unfortunately, you can’t put a price on quality.  

Searching for childcare and early learning services would be way easier if you could, but in early education more money doesn’t automatically mean more quality and the opposite is also true, a lower price doesn’t mean a poorer quality. 

The frustrating thing about this is that when it comes to early learning quality is really important.  

We know that children thrive in high quality settings and that quality comes in many different shapes and sizes. You might find it in the magnificent purpose-built setting near your job in the city or it could be alive and well in the humble home of your local family day care educator.   

For many parents (especially new ones) it can be tricky to know what to look for when it comes to quality and how to compare different services, and that’s the simple reason we created the KindiCare Rating.  

The KindiCare Rating combines information from a variety of sources, including the National Quality Framework (NQF), to generate a numerical rating parents can use to gain a quick overview of quality in a service.  

KindiCare Founder and CEO Benjamin Balk says that while the Australian Government’s National Quality Framework has been an excellent initiative in terms of boosting the standard of early education, the KindiCare Rating offers additional detail which can really help parents in understanding a holistic view of a centre or service, including community feedback from families that use the service. 

“The government ratings are in three buckets; childcare centres are either Working Towards, Meeting or Exceeding the government standards, and this isn’t necessarily something new parents, first entering childcare, understand or find helpful.”    

“What we’ve created is a numerical rating system, that combines the government rating with all the info and data we have about a service and makes it super simple to assess how a childcare centre or service is doing.” 

A childcare service’s KindiCare Rating is derived from a range of factors that can contribute to the quality of care provided by a service.  

These include: 

• Government service quality audits, ratings, reviews and trends. 
• Community feedback collected by KindiCare from a number of sources including over 175,000 market reviews and opinions. 
• The type of childcare service and characteristics of the provider, centre and offering. 
• The currency and quality of the information available for the service. 
• The stability and length of operation of the provider managing the centre and delivering the service. 

We collate all this information and subject it to a bespoke algorithm that generates a unique and independent rating of every childcare service in Australia.  

One of the great things about KindiCare Rating is that they change in real time as we receive new information, this means the rating you see for a service will be based on the best data currently available.      

Childcare services will receive a rating from NR (not rated) through to 10, and as with most rating systems, the higher the better.  

You can use the following guide to better understand what a good KindiCare Rating is:  

Excellent: 9.0 and above.

Very Good: 8.5 - 9.0.

Good: 7.5 - 8.5.

Fair: 5.0 - 7.5.

Poor: 5.0 and below.

Not Rated: NR 

When researching your options, you can use a childcare centre’s KindiCare Rating to learn how a service in your area is doing in comparison to other local providers and, how services in your area compare to the standard nationally. 

Using a childcare centre’s KindiCare Rating in combo with a call to the director and a tour will help you gain a really great picture of how well a service will be able to meet your family’s needs.  

Don’t worry if a centre you are interested in doesn’t yet have a KindiCare Rating!  

We only rate services that have been operating for two years or more and who have received an assessment under the National Quality Framework.  

There’s a bit of an assessment backlog post-covid and around 10 per cent of services across the country don’t yet have an NQF rating. Keep checking as we are generating ratings as soon as the information is available to us.  

Remember, that while quality can be assessed remotely across a variety of domains, this is only part of the puzzle, it’s still important to make the time to tour your preferred childcare services.  

Visiting a service, talking to the director and educators, experiencing the environment and watching the children play will give you a wonderful sense of some of the less tangible aspects of quality and whether the service is the right fit for your family.    

To see your service’s KindiCare Rating search here.