Privacy notice

Who is responsible

This site is operated by Search Ventures Ltd (registered in England and Wales, company number 10588553), of 82A James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Suffolk, IP28 7DE. We are the data controller for the personal data described here. You can reach us at [email protected] or through our contact form.

The short version

We publish information about childcare settings that is already public: Ofsted's register and inspection reports, Department for Education figures, Census population data, and what settings publish on their own websites. Most of that is information about businesses. Some of it is personal data, and that is covered below.

From you, we collect almost nothing. There is no account. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, we do not track you from site to site, and we have no mailing list.

Information about childminders

A childminder works from home, so their name is a person's name and their setting is a person's house. We treat that seriously.

We list only childminders who appear on Ofsted's consented list — that is, those who have agreed with Ofsted that their details may be published. We show the name and the part of the address Ofsted publishes, which is the town and postcode, never the full street address. Childminders who have not consented are not on this site at all: we do not hold their names or addresses, and where Ofsted redacts a provider we hold nothing that identifies them.

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: helping parents find registered childcare, using information the regulator publishes for that purpose. If you are a childminder and you would rather not be listed, tell us and we will remove you. We will not ask you to justify it.

Inspection reports

We quote from Ofsted inspection reports. Inspectors sometimes name the manager or the provider in the body of a report. We remove those names automatically before anything is stored, so a sentence that read “the manager, Mrs A, ensures staff are well supported” is stored and shown as “the manager ensures staff are well supported”. The claim survives; the person does not.

If a name reaches the site despite that, tell us and we will take it out.

What we collect from you

Only these, and only when you choose to send them:

• The contact form. Your email address, your message, your name if you give it, and which setting it concerns. We use it to answer you and to act on what you tell us. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in replying to correspondence.
• Adding information about a setting. The facts you submit — a price, opening times, whether meals are included. There is no free-text box, no name and no email. We store a one-way hash of your IP address to stop one person submitting the same thing a hundred times. The hash is salted with a secret we keep off the site, so it cannot be turned back into your address.
• Claiming a setting's page. If you run a setting and claim its page, we send a verification code to a contact address that Ofsted or the setting's own website already publishes, and we store that address, a hash of the code, and the details you then enter. We do not send codes to an address you supply yourself, because that would let anybody claim anybody's page.
• Server logs. Our web server records requests in the ordinary way, including IP addresses, for security and to find faults. These are not used to build any profile of you.

Cookies and what is stored in your browser

We set no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies, so there is no cookie banner to dismiss. We do measure how many people visit, but with a tool that does not use cookies and does not store anything on your device — see below.

• Your shortlist is kept in your own browser, in local storage. It never reaches our server and we cannot see it. Clearing your browser data clears it.
• Cloudflare Turnstile is the anti-spam check on our forms. It is a privacy-preserving alternative to a CAPTCHA: it does not ask you to identify traffic lights and Cloudflare states that it does not use it to track people across sites. It does receive your IP address and sets a short-lived token in order to work. It appears only on pages with a form.
• Maps are drawn with OpenStreetMap tiles, which means your browser requests images from OpenStreetMap and they see your IP address as a result. This happens only on pages showing a map.
• Ahrefs Web Analytics counts visits so we know which pages are worth improving. We chose it because it sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device: it records the page address, the page you came from, your screen size and your browser language, and no identifier that would let anyone recognise you on a second visit or on another website. Because it stores nothing on your device, it needs no consent banner.

Who else sees it

Nobody buys anything from us, because we sell nothing. Personal data reaches these organisations only because they provide part of the service:

• Cloudflare — the anti-spam check on forms, and the network this site is served through, which means Cloudflare handles every request and sees your IP address.
• Ahrefs — the visit counting described above. Ahrefs is a Singapore company; the transfer relies on the UK's international data transfer mechanisms.
• Our email host — messages you send through the contact form, and verification codes, pass through it.
• Our hosting provider — the server this site runs on.

We will disclose information if the law requires it, and we will say so publicly where we are permitted to.

Where it goes

This site is hosted in Europe. Cloudflare is a United States company and processes the Turnstile check on infrastructure that may be outside the UK; those transfers rely on the UK's international data transfer mechanisms. Nothing else is deliberately sent abroad.

How long we keep it

• Contact form messages: two years, so we can pick up a conversation and see what we already corrected.
• Contributions: for as long as the fact is shown, and the IP hash for twelve months.
• Claims: verification codes expire within days; the record that a page was claimed is kept while the claim stands.
• Server logs: no more than three months.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict what we do with it, or to stop doing it altogether. Where we rely on legitimate interests — which is most of this site — you have the right to object, and we have to stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your rights.

In practice: write to us and say what you want removed. We do not charge, we do not require identification for a simple correction, and we will answer within one month.

Children

This site is for adults choosing childcare. It is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. Nothing on this site identifies a child, and the screenshots we publish as evidence of a price are cropped to the text and refused altogether if a photograph would fall inside the crop.

If you think we have got this wrong

Please tell us first through the contact form, because we would rather fix it than argue about it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, and you do not have to come to us first.

Changes

If we change how any of this works we will change this page and move the date at the top. If a change is significant we will say so on the home page.