ChildcareScan — Quality Childcare Centres Across Australia
18,430 Australian childcare centres, each with its official ACECQA quality rating, searchable by centre name, suburb or postcode.
The problem it solves
Picking a childcare centre is one of the highest-stakes decisions young families make, and Australia actually publishes official quality assessments for every service — most parents just never find them. ChildcareScan closes that gap: it surfaces ACECQA's ratings in a comparison-first interface covering long day care, family day care, preschools/kindergartens and outside school hours care.
Every centre gets a profile with its current NQS rating, service type and location, so a query as simple as a suburb name returns a shortlist that can be compared side by side.
What families can do
- Search the way parents actually search — by centre name, suburb or postcode.
- Read each centre's NQS rating, assessed across the standard's 7 quality areas.
- Browse state by state: New South Wales leads with 6,221 centres, followed by Victoria (5,092) and Queensland (3,371).
- Shortlist standout services rated Exceeding NQS or Excellent — only 25 centres nationwide hold the top grade.
- See the national picture: 73.8% of centres meet the standard and 18.3% exceed it, charted on the stats page.
- Learn before deciding with a plain-English guide to the rating system and a parenting-focused blog.
Coverage across Australia
The dataset mirrors the full regulated sector: 18,430 centres from 7,267 approved providers across all 8 states and territories. Ratings come straight from ACECQA and are refreshed regularly, so what a family reads matches the official register.
Nuance matters too: just 10 services nationwide carry the lowest grade, while 1,338 (7.7%) remain at Working Towards NQS — context that helps parents read any single rating fairly.
Build and architecture
ChildcareScan is bespoke software: Laravel and PHP on a MySQL database shaped to render thousands of centre and state pages instantly. There is no theme and no plugin anywhere in the stack — search, profiles and programmatic pages are all first-party code.
Discoverability rests on programmatic SEO — one clean URL per centre, state and service type, with metadata and structured data generated from the records — backed by a scheduled sync against the official source.
What this product demonstrates
ChildcareScan sits in my own-product catalogue: I conceived it, coded it and operate it with no client involved, including the invisible work — cleaning official data, keeping the sync healthy, watching performance budgets.
For anyone weighing up hiring me, it is tangible proof of how I treat a sensitive vertical: official sources, plain language, and an experience designed around the decision-maker rather than the developer.
Questions parents ask
What rating system does ChildcareScan use?
The National Quality Standard (NQS), Australia's official framework that assesses every education and care service across 7 quality areas, on a scale from Significant Improvement Required up to Excellent.
Who produces the underlying data?
ACECQA — the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority, the national regulator. ChildcareScan republishes those official assessments and refreshes them regularly.
How many services are listed?
18,430 centres run by 7,267 approved providers across all 8 states and territories, from 6,221 centres in New South Wales down to 238 in the Northern Territory.
Do families pay anything to use it?
No. Searching, comparing ratings and reading any centre profile is completely free, with no sign-up required.