How NurseryWise works
Everything here comes from files the government publishes. The only clever part is that we keep the old ones.
Where the data comes from
Ofsted publishes Childcare providers and inspections: management information twice a year: in January or February for the position on 31 December, and in July or August for 30 June. Each release is a snapshot of who was registered on that date, published under the Open Government Licence v3. We hold 10 releases, December 2021 to June 2026.
Why we have to work them out
The file lists active providers only. There is no closure date, no closure flag and no archive of settings that have gone; a nursery that shuts is simply absent next time. So a closure here means one thing: present in one release, missing from the next. That places the event inside a six-month window, which is why every date on the site reads “gone by” a month rather than pretending to be exact.
The same disappearance can be caused by re-registration. A change of owner or legal entity gives the setting a new URN and drops the old one, which is indistinguishable from a closure in this data. We do not yet match departed URNs to new registrations at the same postcode, so a minority of rows on the closures page are continuations rather than closures. That is the biggest known gap on the site.
Why we have more of it than the current file
We hold 126,218 inspections. Releases up to December 2025 carried the three most recent inspections for each provider; the June 2026 format dropped the second and third. Keeping the older releases is the only reason that history still exists in a structured form anywhere.
Old grades and new report cards
Inspections before November 2025 produced a single overall grade: Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement, or Inadequate. From November 2025 Ofsted issues a report card instead : a standard in each of seven areas and no overall grade at all.
Only 3,590 settings have been inspected under the new system so far, so most pages still show an older grade. Where that grade is more than five years old we say so plainly, because it was awarded under rules that no longer exist.
What we deliberately do not publish
Ofsted redacts the name, address, town and postcode of every childminder and home childcarer in the main file, which is about half of all registered providers. We keep those rows for counts and trends only, and never show a name.
A separate Ofsted file lists childminders who have consented to publication. Consent can be withdrawn, so we replace that table completely on every import rather than merging it: anyone who drops out of the file disappears from the site.
Things we know are imperfect
- Ofsted's own file alternates between two character encodings from one release to the next, and a handful of June 2026 rows carry a time value where a grade should be. We ignore those.
- The “Web link” column Ofsted added in June 2026 contains the words “Web link” on every row rather than an actual link, so we build links to Ofsted from the URN instead.
- Cumbria became Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness in April 2023. We do not stitch the old series onto either successor, so Cumbria simply ends.
- Telephone numbers and map positions come from Ofsted's own provider pages and we only have them for some settings so far.
Where the fee figures come from
No national dataset holds what an individual nursery charges, and Ofsted does not collect it. What does exist is the Department for Education's Childcare and early years provider survey, which publishes mean and median parent-paid hourly fees for each local authority, broken down by the child's age. That is what we show, always labelled as a council-wide survey average rather than a price.
We drop any figure based on fewer than ten surveyed providers, because a median of six nurseries is not worth printing.
Using this yourself
Everything on this site is public sector information reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0:
- Ofsted childcare providers and inspections management information, the provider list, registration details, places and inspection outcomes. Crown copyright, OGL v3.
- Ofsted provider pages, telephone numbers and coordinates, read from the public pages at reports.ofsted.gov.uk, which robots.txt permits. Crown copyright, OGL v3.
- DfE Childcare and early years provider survey and Funded early education and childcare, local-authority fees and funded-entitlement take-up. Crown copyright, OGL v3.
- ONS Postcode Directory, via postcodes.io, for turning postcodes into map positions. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026; contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026; source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Inspection outcomes are quoted exactly as published, with their dates. NurseryWise is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Ofsted or the Department for Education. If something looks wrong, check Ofsted's own page for that setting. Every nursery page links to it.