Methodology
Daycare Near Me is an independent directory of New Zealand's 4,375 licensed early childhood education services. We aggregate government-published data so families and operators can find, compare, and benchmark centres without scraping the source.
What we publish
- 4,375 licensed ECE services with identity, address, contact, roll, age breakdown, ethnicity, Equity Index, 20 Hours ECE participation, Takiwā (iwi region), and Statistical Area 2 geography.
- 33 operator / chain entities assembled from MOE-name patterns + manual curation.
- 537 financial records from Charities Annual Returns where centres are operated by registered NZ charities.
- 4,286 cross-referenced suburb safety links joining centres to crimestats.co.nz NZ Police data.
Sources
- Ministry of Education ECE Directory — educationcounts.govt.nz. Refreshed nightly upstream; we pull every change cycle. 49 fields per service. Roll data refreshed annually each July from the Annual ECE Census.
- Education Review Office (ERO) — ero.govt.nz. We link to each centre's ERO institution page. Verbatim quote extraction is in progress.
- Charities Services (Te Rātā Atawhai) — charities.govt.nz. Open data API; we pull all 45,500+ registered charities and match by name/address to centre operators. Annual Returns provide revenue, expenses, employees, and govt vs non-govt income split.
- crimestats.co.nz — sibling Pangaea project; NZ Police-derived suburb safety scoring.
- IRD / MSD / parents.education.govt.nz — for the FamilyBoost + Childcare Subsidy + 20 Hours ECE calculator policy parameters.
How we match charities to centres
Two-pass approach in scripts/ingest/match-charities-to-centres.mjs + match-charities-by-address.mjs:
- Name fuzzy match using Jaccard token overlap (≥0.7 + suburb tie-break). Catches obvious cases like Geraldine Pre-School Charitable Trust ↔ Geraldine Preschool Incorporated.
- Address tie-break for unmatched ECE charities: normalise street + suburb, exact match. Catches cases where the charity's legal name doesn't share tokens with the centre's trading name.
We do not assert a match when confidence is low. Charity numbers, OrganisationIds, and source URLs are surfaced on every centre page so you can verify.
How we match centres to suburbs
Three-tier strategy (ports match-schools-to-suburbs.cjs from the SchoolsData Pangaea sibling): (A) exact suburb-name + region match, (B) name unique + geo nearest within 5km, (C) lat/lng nearest within 10km. 98% of centres resolved.
What we do NOT publish
- Recommendations or "best of" rankings. We surface the data; you decide.
- Personal information about children, parents, or staff. Only the publicly-listed centre Contact person.
- Fees — not collected by MOE. Coming via a separate user-contributed + operator self-attest pipeline.
- Per-centre safety incidents — WorkSafe and MOE keep these but only release at industry level. We don't speculate.
Update cadence
- MOE Directory: pulled on demand (nightly upstream).
- Charities Annual Returns: quarterly.
- Suburb safety: live API client-side fetch (always current).
- Calculator parameters: reviewed each NZ Budget cycle (May).
API + LLM access
Every centre has a machine-readable companion at /api/centre/{slug}/facts.json and /markdown.md. The full URL index lives at /llms-full.txt. An MCP server at /.netlify/functions/mcp exposes lookup + search tools for AI agents — see /mcp-install.