How to Choose a Childcare Centre in Maroubra: 12 Questions to Ask on a Tour

Choosing a childcare centre is mostly done on instinct in the first ten minutes, and then justified afterwards. That instinct is usually right, but it helps to know what you are actually looking at. These are the questions worth asking on a tour of any centre in Maroubra, Kingsford, Randwick or Coogee, and what a good answer sounds like.

What should I look at in the first ten minutes?

Watch the children rather than the building. Are they absorbed in something, or drifting? Does an educator know a child by name and know what they were doing yesterday? Is the room calm, and if it is not, is somebody responding?

New equipment is easy to buy. A settled room is not.

How long have the educators been here?

This is the single most useful question you can ask, and the one centres find hardest to answer well. Children build security through repetition with the same adults. An educator who has been in the room for years knows which child needs to be held facing outwards and whose cry means tired rather than hungry.

Ask how long the educators in your child’s room have worked there. Ask it plainly and listen to whether the answer is specific.

Do you use casual or agency staff?

Follow-up question, and the more revealing one. Every centre has staff away sometimes. What matters is who walks into the room when that happens: somebody your child knows, or an agency educator meeting them for the first time.

At MJEEC our nursery is staffed by the same permanent educators every day. We do not use casual or agency staff in the baby room, and when someone is away the person who steps in is usually the Director. More about our nursery.

What are the ratios, and how do they work in a mixed-age room?

The National Regulations set the minimum: one educator to four children under two, one to five for two to three year olds, and one to ten for children over three up to preschool age. Every centre must meet these, so meeting them is not a selling point.

The useful question is what happens in a room that spans the two year mark. A toddler room taking children from 18 months contains both age groups, and the under twos must still be counted at one to four. Ask how the centre handles that. It is a question that separates centres that know their obligations from centres that assume.

Ask about room size too, not just ratio. Fourteen babies in a room is a very different day from twenty four, even at the same ratio.

How do you settle a new child in?

Listen for whether settling is treated as a process or a date. A centre that starts your child on the day the enrolment form says, regardless of how it is going, is telling you something.

Ask whether you can stay in the room, how many visits happen before a full day, and who decides when your child is ready.

What happens at sleep time?

For babies, ask whether the centre follows Red Nose safe sleeping guidance, how often sleeping children are physically checked, and whether those checks are recorded. Ask whether each baby has their own cot and how cots are cleaned between uses.

Ask whether babies are ever given a bottle in a cot. The answer should be no.

Who cooks the food, and what happens with allergies?

Food cooked on site by a chef is different from food delivered in. Ask to see a menu, ask how it changes with the seasons, and ask what happens for a child with an allergy or a cultural dietary requirement.

Ask whether meals are included in the fee or charged separately. It changes the real cost more than people expect.

What does the school readiness program actually involve?

Almost every centre says it prepares children for school. Ask what that means in practice and how long it runs.

Good answers involve more than letters and numbers: managing big feelings, sorting out a disagreement, staying with something long enough to finish it, opening a lunchbox, asking an adult for help. Ask whether the year before school runs on a school-like routine, because a child who has never eaten at a set time finds February hard.

Ours runs across two years rather than one term. More about the year before school.

How will I know what happened during the day?

Ask what you get and when. Photos and observations posted through the day are more useful than a summary at pick-up, and far more useful than a whiteboard.

For babies, ask specifically whether sleeps, bottles and nappy changes are recorded as they happen.

What is the centre’s NQS rating, and when was it assessed?

Every approved service is assessed against the National Quality Standard across seven quality areas. The rating and the date are public on the ACECQA register, so you can check the answer you are given.

An older rating is not automatically a problem, but it is worth asking what has changed since.

What will I actually pay after the Child Care Subsidy?

The daily fee is not what you pay. Ask for the gap fee for a family like yours, not the headline rate, and ask what is included in it. Nappies, wipes, sunscreen, hats and meals are included at some centres and charged at others.

Can I come back and stay a while?

A tour shows you the centre. Staying in the room shows your child the centre, and shows you how the room runs when nobody is presenting it.

If a centre is happy for you to sit in the room your child would join, with the educators who would care for them, that tells you a great deal before anyone answers a single question.

Where to next

If you would like the answers we give to these questions, we have written them out in full: Childcare in Maroubra: the questions parents ask us most.

Or read about each of our rooms: Nursery, Toddlers, Preschool 1 and Preschool 2.