I recorded a quick, scrappy walkthrough showing how to run a complete online background check on your centre in under 10 minutes using public government registries (using an example: Milestones Early Learning in North Parramatta, NSW).
A tour will never show you this.
When you tour a daycare, you are seeing the front-of-house sales pitch: a freshly swept outdoor play area, bright rooms, and a warm welcome from the centre director.
If you judge a centre purely by its physical space and whether the staff are polite when you walk through the door, you miss the systemic factors driving safety and educator burnout.
The Background Check:
Here are the direct steps to check your centre and what to look out for, as covered in my video walkthrough.
1. Start at StartingBlocks.gov.au
Search your specific centre (name and location) and click View Details.
Look under Provider Name. If the legal entity ends in “Pty Ltd” or “Limited,” it is almost certainly a for-profit commercial operator. Roughly 74% of long day care places in Australia are for-profit.
Check to see if its part of a Large Provider (a provider that operates 25 or more centres).
Note: Even if your for-profit provider operates less than 25 centres, be aware that when you combine scale and cost pressure, it may result in profits ahead of what’s best for children.
2. Review enforcement actions (if applicable)
On your centre’s StartingBlocks page, scroll to Regulatory activities. It shows how many enforcement actions were issued in the past two years.
Click View enforcement actions to see the date and the type (which ranges in severity) but not what actually happened. So ask the centre directly.
3. Investigate the Large Provider (if applicable)
Click on their Large Provider Register link on Starting Blocks.
Review their corporate compliance record and high-level financials. Large for-profit operators face enforcement actions at roughly three times the rate of other large providers.
Look at the entity-level financials with a critical lens (see the financial explainer below).
Check the provider’s other centres
On the large provider page, scroll through the list of services. Centres with enforcement actions are flagged. Click into a few, especially ones in your state.
Same type, same date, across many centres usually means one action applied to the whole group, not separate incidents at each centre.
4. Check the Assessment Gap
Look at the Last Quality Rating Issued date on Starting Blocks.
Many centres go 3 to 6+ years between formal National Quality Standard (NQS) assessments. In our example, the centre was last assessed in 2020 and re-assessed in 2026, meaning an entire cohort of children passed from infancy to primary school without a regulator formally rating the service once.
Note the Last Visited date. If a centre was visited recently by a regulator, but no new rating was published, the regulator was likely called out for an unannounced spot-check, incident, or compliance follow-up. Ask the centre what triggered that visit.
5. Pull the Conditions on the ACECQA National Register (if applicable)
Head to acecqa.gov.au and search the provider’s legal name under the National Registers.
Individual service pages show whether your local centre has active enforcement actions. But the Provider Approval page shows the conditions imposed on the corporate owners at the top.
This reveals whether the regulator has attached special rules, mandated extra supervisory ratios, or frozen company expansion due to repeated breaches like in our example.
6. Skim the Google Reviews
Sort by newest. A third of all centres have changed provider since 2013 (over 40% of for-profit centres), so an old review may be describing a different business.
Don’t focus on facilities or a friendly front desk. Look for staff names that keep appearing year after year, mentions of turnover, and how the director handles concerns.
Read how the centre replies to low reviews. Is it defensive or actually dealing with the issue?
Take it with a large grain of salt: Parents see roughly 5% of the day at drop-off and pick-up, and what those parents value may be different to what you value.
Financial Explainer: Why is a Massive Provider Reporting an $85M Loss?
In the walkthrough, you’ll see Affinity Education Group, owned by private equity firm Quadrant, bringing in over $650 million in revenue and reporting an $85 million loss.
Does that mean it’s going broke? Not necessarily. Losses like this in private-equity-owned groups usually come from costs that sit above the centres themselves:
Debt. Private equity buys companies largely with borrowed money. A big chunk of the cash the centres earn goes to interest.
Write-downs. When a group pays more for centres than they turn out to be worth, or closes some, it writes down their value. That shows up as a loss, often a big one in a single year.
Leases. Rent appears as depreciation and interest rather than “rent”, but it’s still real cash going out every month.
This is how these structures typically work, but it is not a read of Affinity’s financial statements.
But anyways, that’s a lot of accounting talk. Don’t worry if it went over your head.
This is all you need to understand as a parent:
For-profit operators are under pressure to keep costs down, especially when they’re carrying losses or answering to investors. That pressure exists in every for-profit centre, even the good ones.
Rent, property and head office costs are fixed. Labour is the one cost they can adjust, and it’s around 70% of what it costs to run a centre.
Here’s what that means for your child: fewer staff, less qualified staff, underpaid staff, and the high turnover that follows. It’s the exact opposite of what young children need to feel secure and build attachment.
What to Ask Your Daycare
Download my full Daycare Audit Checklist with question scripts and red flags to watch out for.
