Every approved child care service in Australia — long day care, family day care, outside school hours care, preschool — is assessed against the same national benchmark and given a public rating. It’s one of the most useful, most under-used tools available when you’re choosing care, so here’s how to actually read it.
Who does the rating, and what it’s based on
Ratings come from the National Quality Standard (NQS), run by the Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) together with your state or territory regulator. Assessors visit the service, observe it in action, and rate it against 7 quality areas:
- Educational program and practice
- Children’s health and safety
- Physical environment
- Staffing arrangements
- Relationships with children
- Collaborative partnerships with families and communities
- Governance and leadership
Each area gets its own rating, and those combine into one overall rating for the service. From 1 January 2026, Quality Areas 2 and 7 carry a stronger child-safety focus following recent reforms — worth knowing if you’re comparing an older rating against a recent one.
The rating levels, from lowest to highest
- Significant Improvement Required — the service doesn’t meet one of the seven quality areas, or a legal requirement, and there’s a real risk to children’s safety, health or wellbeing. The regulator takes immediate action here; you shouldn’t see many services sitting at this level for long.
- Working Towards NQS — provides safe education and care, but one or more areas have been identified for improvement.
- Meeting NQS — meets the national standard across all seven areas. This is a genuinely solid, fully compliant result — most services sit here.
- Exceeding NQS — goes beyond the standard’s requirements in at least four of the seven quality areas, with practices that are embedded, reflected on, and genuinely engage families.
- Excellent — the highest possible rating, and a different kind of achievement: a service must already be rated Exceeding in all seven areas, then apply directly to ACECQA and demonstrate sector leadership and innovation. Fewer than 1% of services nationally hold it.
You may also see Provisional — Not Yet Assessed. That simply means the service is new and hasn’t had its first assessment yet — it isn’t a red flag on its own, but it does mean there’s no track record to check.
Where to actually find a rating
Go to StartingBlocks.gov.au — it’s the free government site built specifically for families, and it lets you search by suburb and compare services side by side on rating, fees, vacancies, and inclusion support. Ratings are also published on ACECQA’s national registers, and every service is legally required to display its current rating certificate on site — so if you’re visiting in person, you can simply look for it.
Reading it like a parent, not an auditor
A few things worth knowing before you treat the overall rating as the whole story:
- Check the quality area breakdown, not just the headline rating. A service can be “Meeting” overall while genuinely excelling in the areas that matter most to you — say, relationships with children — and merely adequate elsewhere. The overall number hides that detail.
- Look at the date. Services are reassessed every couple of years, not continuously. A rating from four years ago describes the service as it was then, not necessarily as it is now — staff, management and practices can all change in that time.
- “Meeting” is not a low bar. It’s easy to read “Meeting” as the middle-of-the-road option when “Exceeding” is sitting above it, but Meeting NQS means full compliance with a genuinely rigorous national standard. Plenty of excellent services sit there rather than chasing the Exceeding paperwork.
- A rating tells you about the system, not the fit. It can’t tell you whether your particular child will settle well with a particular educator, or whether the vibe is right for your family. Use the rating to build a shortlist, then visit in person to decide.
The short version
Search your suburb on StartingBlocks.gov.au, compare overall ratings first to build a shortlist, then open the quality-area breakdown on your top few to see where each one actually stands out. Check the assessment date. Then go and visit — the rating gets you to the door, but it won’t tell you how it feels to walk through it.