How we score child care centres in Perth Metropolitan

Perth Early Learning Guide currently scores 153 child care centre businesses across Perth Metropolitan. Every score comes from one rubric applied the same way to every listing: no business pays to move up, and no editor nudges a number because they liked a phone call. This page sets out exactly how that number is built, why we weight it the way we do, and where the data falls short.

The five signals, heaviest first

Each business gets a composite score from 0 to 100, built from five measured signals. Here they are in order of weight:

SignalWeightWhat it measuresSentiment28%A synthesis of recent review themes: what parents actually praise or complain aboutRating26%The Google aggregate star ratingVolume20%How many reviews exist, log-scaled so a handful of reviews can't outscore hundredsCompleteness14%Whether phone, website, hours and address are all listedRecency12%How recently families have actually left a review

Why sentiment leads

A star average hides more than it reveals. Two centres can both sit at 4.5 stars, but one might have that rating because every review is glowing, and the other because a run of one-star complaints about the same problem, say, staff turnover, late pickups, or a change in room ratios, is being cancelled out by older five-star reviews. The star number alone can't tell you which one you're looking at. Reading what recent reviews actually say is the only way to catch that pattern, which is why sentiment carries more weight in our rubric than the raw star rating. For a decision as important as who looks after your child, a repeated complaint buried under an average score is exactly the kind of thing worth surfacing.

Why the other signals matter

Rating still matters a great deal, it's the clearest single snapshot of how families feel overall, so it's weighted almost as heavily as sentiment. Volume matters because a business with 4 reviews and a business with 400 aren't equally certain quantities; we log-scale this so a small handful of reviews doesn't get treated as equivalent to a large, stable track record. Completeness matters in a practical sense: a family choosing care for their child needs to be able to find the address, check the hours, and actually call someone, so we check whether phone, website, hours and address are all present on the listing. Recency matters because a childcare centre can change quickly, new management, new staff, a new director, and reviews from three years ago may no longer describe the place as it runs today.

The honest limits

We don't publish anything we can't stand behind. Businesses with few recent reviews produce a low-confidence score, and we label them as such, rather than presenting a thin sample as if it were a settled verdict. We also don't republish reviews wholesale: our sentiment signal is a synthesis of themes across recent reviews, and we link out to Google so you can read the original source reviews yourself and form your own view.

What never changes the score

Scores are earned from this rubric and the underlying data, full stop. They are never edited by hand. Where paid placement exists anywhere on this site, it is always clearly labelled, and it never changes a business's score. Where a list's picks or order have been editor-reviewed rather than generated purely from the rubric, that is disclosed on the page itself, so you always know which kind of list you're looking at, like our best kindergarten and preschool list.

Who's behind this

Perth Early Learning Guide is published by Scout Local Media, an independent Australian publisher building practical local guides and business directories so people can make informed decisions about the services they rely on, while giving good local businesses a fair way to be found. Rankings on this site are maintained by Farah Vogel, Content Lead, who oversees how the rubric is applied and kept honest. Data is refreshed monthly, and each listing carries its own "last verified" stamp so you can see the maintenance is active, not a one-off snapshot from years back. Questions, corrections, or a business you think we've got wrong: reach the team at hello@scoutlocalmedia.com.au, or visit the home page to browse the full directory. More on the publisher is at scoutlocalmedia.com.au.