How government assessors rated every South Australian childcare centre

Just five SA childcare centres are rated as ‘excellent’ by government inspectors, while 166 aren’t meeting the national standard. See how the centres in your area rate.

One in every seven childcare services in South Australia is not meeting national standards, latest figures show – and at least half of those failing to make the grade are out of hours school services.

Data from the Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority shows that, at the end of September, 166 of 1227 services statewide were rated as “working towards” national quality framework standards.

Services are assessed on seven criteria – education, health and safety, physical environment, staffing, relationships with children, partnerships with families and communities, and governance and leadership.

But some services have not been audited for many years.

Hundreds of individual family daycare operators are not individually assessed, instead falling under one of 12 region-based schemes.

Of those, six have “working towards” ratings, while four meet the standards and just one exceeds them. One remains unrated.

Daniella and Jozef at Nazareth Catholic Community – Early Childhood Centre in Findon. Picture: Brenton Edwards

They say it takes a village to raise a child, which is exactly the case for Nazareth Early Childhood Centre.

The western suburbs childcare centre is one of just five across the state rated as “excellent”, while 539 exceed the national standards and 481 meet them.

“Behind the excellent rating is the community that we have,” director Nici Slack said.

“We have an amazing partnership with Flinders University with their occupational therapy, nutritionists, speech pathologists and they all come into the centre as apart of our everyday.

Daniella and Jozef childcare centre Nazareth Catholic Community is now one of five centres in the state rated as “excellent”. Picture: Brenton Edwards

“We also have a lovely group of elderly residents who come in, it’s really a huge family.”

Ms Slack said the road to the excellent rating has been a long one but no stone was left unturned after the centre was issued a ‘working towards’ rating back in 2015.

“I know there was a lot of reflection and a lot of community discussion along the way,” Ms Slack said.

“We value the children and we value their independence, curiosity, problem solving, creativity.

“We also value the process of what they’re doing rather than the product of what they deliver at the end.”

In SA, the Education Standards Board is responsible for the audits which categorised on whether they’re working towards national quality standards (NQS), meeting NQS, exceeding NQS or excellent.

Between January and September this year, a total of 80 centres have been inspected compared with just 67 for the same period in 2020, well down on the pre-Covid number of 183 in 2019.

The board has previously stressed services rated “working towards” are providing a safe education and care program “but have one or more elements of a standard identified for improvement”.

As well as formal assessments of services, it does “monitoring visits, tele-monitoring, video conferencing and stakeholder engagement sessions” to aid compliance.

Those with “working towards” ratings are more closely monitored by the board, which views the ratings as “one factor” families can consider in deciding where to send their children.