Terms of use

1. Who we are, and what this is

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. You can contact us at [email protected].

By using this site you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use it.

2. What our information is

Everything here comes from one of four places, and every page says which:

• Ofsted. The childcare register, inspection grades and dates, and quotations from published inspection reports. Used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Other government sources. Department for Education figures, the register of schools, and Census population data from the Office for National Statistics. Also Open Government Licence.
• The settings themselves. Prices, opening times and similar, read from their own public websites, quoted with a link and a date, or entered by a setting that has claimed its page.
• Parents. A small number of facts submitted by members of the public, always labelled as such.

3. What our information is not

This matters more than anything else on this page.

• It is not advice — not childcare advice, not financial advice, and not legal advice. It is information to help you decide who to ring.
• It is not a recommendation. We do not rank settings by quality, we do not accept payment for placement, and appearing here is not an endorsement by us. Settings cannot pay to be listed, to be listed higher, or to have anything removed.
• It is not a quotation. A published price is what a setting advertised on the date shown. What you actually pay depends on the days you need, your funded hours and their current rates. Always confirm the price with the setting before you rely on it.
• It is not proof of a place. Registered capacity is not availability. Nothing here tells you whether a setting has room.
• It is not current by definition. Records are accurate as at the date shown beside them. Settings change hands, change prices and close.

4. Ofsted grades, and concerns Ofsted looked into

We reproduce Ofsted's findings; we do not make our own. A grade relates to one inspection on one date and we always show that date. Where we record that Ofsted looked into a concern, we use Ofsted's own category wording and link to what Ofsted published. That a concern was looked into does not by itself mean anything was found, and we say so wherever we show it. We do not publish entries more than five years old.

We do not add any judgement of our own to these records, and we ask readers not to either. If you believe we have reproduced a record inaccurately, or that it is out of date, tell us — see section 9.

5. Using the site

You may read it, link to it, and use it to choose childcare. Please do not:

• scrape, harvest or bulk-copy the site, or use automated means to extract its contents;
• republish substantial parts of our compiled database as your own — the underlying public records are free for anyone to use from the original sources, and we would rather you took them from there;
• use the site or its contact details to send marketing to settings;
• submit anything untrue, abusive, or about a named individual;
• try to interfere with the site or gain access to any part of it that is not public.

6. What you send us

If you submit a fact about a setting, you confirm that you believe it is true and that you are free to share it. You give us permission to publish it and to keep publishing it. We may edit or remove anything, and we check submissions before they appear. We will not publish opinions, reviews or anything about a named member of staff, and our forms have no free-text box for that reason.

If you claim a setting's page, you confirm that you are authorised to act for that setting. We verify claims by sending a code to a contact address already published by Ofsted or by the setting itself.

7. Our content and other people's

Public-sector information on this site is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and remains Crown copyright. Quotations from a setting's own website remain theirs and are used, with attribution and a link, so that a reader can check what we say against the source. Everything else on the site — the writing, the design, and the way the data is put together — belongs to us.

Where we link to another website, we are not responsible for what is on it.

8. Availability

We make no promise that the site will be available at any particular time. We may change it, or withdraw it, without notice.

9. Corrections — how to get something changed

We would rather be corrected than be wrong. If anything here about you or your setting is inaccurate, out of date, or should not be published:

• Write to us through the contact form, choosing “a correction”, and say what is wrong.
• We will check it against the source and reply. We aim to deal with corrections within five working days, and quicker where something is plainly wrong.
• You do not need to prove who you are to have a wrong fact put right, and you do not need a solicitor to write to us.
• If a record is Ofsted's and we have reproduced it correctly, we will say so and point you to Ofsted, because we cannot change their register. We will still record your comment and show it where it is relevant to do so.

10. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit.

Subject to that:

• The site is provided for information. We take real care to be accurate — we check every quoted price against the page it came from — but we do not guarantee that everything is correct, complete or current, and public records themselves contain errors.
• We are not liable for loss you suffer by relying on the site without checking with the setting, where that loss was not a foreseeable result of our breach.
• We are not responsible for the childcare itself. We do not provide it, arrange it, inspect it or vouch for it. Your agreement is with the setting.
• If you use this site for business purposes, we exclude liability for loss of profit, of business, or of anticipated savings.

If you are a consumer, you have legal rights that these terms do not affect. Nothing here is intended to exclude a right you have under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and any part of these terms found to be unfair will not apply, leaving the rest in force.

11. If you are using the site as a business

If you use the site in the course of a business, you agree to reimburse us for any claim brought against us because of the way you used it or what you submitted. This does not apply to consumers.

12. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The date at the top shows when they last changed, and using the site afterwards means accepting the new version.

13. Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may bring proceedings in your own courts.