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| New Excellent rated services announced | ||||
| How are services rated and what does it mean? | ||||
 The first child care services in the country to be awarded the "Excellent" rating for their quality of child care have been announced by the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA). All four services have demonstrated outstanding commitment to improving quality outcomes for children in Australia.Let's give a big round of applause to the following amazing services that have demonstrated their commitment to the ideals of the NQF and its commitment to continuous improvement.
There has been a lot of talk about the National Quality Framework (NQF) and what it means regarding new child-to-carer ratios, health and safety, and carer qualifications. However, little has been said about the part of the framework that aims to award and reward outstanding services and encourage others to raise the bar of excellence in child care. The purpose of the NQF, which came in officially in January 2012, is to improve and standardise the quality of child care through a range of measures including better staff to child ratios, higher staff qualification's and an assessment and rating system designed to promote continuous improvement. Under the NQF child care services are assessed and rated against the new National Quality Standards (NQS). The NQS is simply a way of measuring the quality of early childhood education and care in Australia. It will cover most long day care, family day care, preschool / kindergarten and outside school hours care services, who are assessed and rated against the seven quality areas, 18 standards and 58 elements that make up the NQS. Yes that's a lot of criteria, so click here to see a summary table of the NQS quality areas, standards and elements! As far as what it means for parents is that ultimately we all want to find a service that provides the best possible care. There are a number of informal ways to judge whether a service is providing quality care, you can visit and check for yourself, you can talk to other parents and you can question the director and the staff of the centre or service you are considering. Background research like this should help you narrow down your options. The NQS Ratings mean that child care services will be "officially" rated and therefore parents can have a better idea from a non-biased viewpoint, of the quality of individual services. Find out more about the NQS Rating system. If you want another way of finding out how good a service is, according to those that use it, then try our Parent Rating System, which enables parents to share their experiences online and to give their service the public recognition it deserves. With over 3,000 parents rating their service since the rating system's launch only a few months ago it's a great way for parents looking for child care to get some feedback from other parents using the service. The built-in safeguards also ensure only fair reviews are published and child care services will have the right to review and reply to all comments made by parents if they so wish. The system also gives valuable feedback to child care services so they know what they can improve on and keep delivering quality outcomes for families. All you have to do is:
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