ECEC Strategy · Compliance & Best Practice
The six questions parents are told to ask on your tour, and how to answer them before anyone arrives
By the time a family walks through your door, they've already done their homework. Many of them arrive with a checklist, and a lot of the time it isn't one they built themselves. It's the one the government gave them.
StartingBlocks.gov.au, run by ACECQA, is the official guidance families are pointed to when they're choosing care. It tells parents to weigh two things: your National Quality Standard rating, and what they see and feel on an in-person visit. Then it hands them a set of specific questions to ask on that visit. Read them closely and a pattern jumps out. Not one of them is about your building, your equipment, or your app. Every question is about how your educators treat a child, and how you'll keep a parent in the loop.
That matters more than it first looks, because the rating alone can't separate you from the centre down the road. As of April 2026, 92% of services are rated Meeting NQS or above, and only 16% of long day care services hold Exceeding (ACECQA). Most centres sit in the same band. So the visit, and the feeling a family carries into it, is where the decision actually gets made.
If a family can watch you answer those six questions before they ever book the tour, you've won the tour before it starts. Video is the pre-visit. It's also how a Meeting-rated centre can out-warm an Exceeding-rated neighbour, because warmth doesn't show up in a rating badge.
Question 1: How will educators comfort my child if they're upset or struggle to separate?
Underneath this is the fear that keeps parents up the night before day one: my child will cry at the door, and a stranger won't care enough to help. You can describe your settling approach in a paragraph, or you can show it. A short film of an educator crouching to a child's level at drop-off, staying with a toddler until the tears ease, does the work no policy PDF can. Let a parent watch the moment they're most afraid of, and watch it end gently. That's the answer.
Question 2: How will I be told about eating, sleeping and toileting each day?
This one comes down to being kept in the loop. A parent handing over their child wants to know they won't be flying blind for eight hours. Show the actual handover. The educator at pickup talking a parent through the day, the daily note, the quiet two-minute conversation that says someone was paying attention. Families don't need a feature list of your communication tools. They need to see a real exchange between an educator and a parent who clearly know each other.
Question 3: How is toilet training supported, and who is my child's main carer?
The second half of that question carries the most weight. The single strongest trust signal parents mention, again and again, is seeing the same educators every day. Consistency is safety to a small child, and parents know it. A meet-the-educator film answers this before anyone asks. Put a name and a face and a voice to the person who'll greet their child each morning. When a parent already feels like they've met your lead educator, the tour becomes a hello rather than an interview.
Question 4: Will my child follow a routine like the one at home?
Parents are checking whether your day will feel foreign or familiar to their child. The reassurance is in the rhythm. Show a real day, morning arrival through to afternoon pickup, so a family can picture their own child inside it. A day-in-the-life film does this better than any timetable on a wall. It lets a parent see the pace of your rooms, the transitions, the meals, the rest. Familiar, calm, predictable. That's what settles both the child and the parent choosing for them.
Question 5: How do educators guide behaviour?
This is a quiet worry parents rarely say out loud. They want to know that when their child pushes, grabs, or melts down, your educators respond with patience, not sharpness. You can't script this convincingly, and you shouldn't try. What you can do is capture the genuine tone of your rooms: an educator kneeling to talk a dispute through, redirecting with warmth, treating a two-year-old with dignity. Parents read tone in seconds. A few honest, unposed moments tell them more about your culture than a page on your behaviour-guidance philosophy ever will.
Question 6: What does the program look like, and how do I share information with the educator?
Families want to know your days have purpose, and that they'll have a real say in their child's care. Show both. A glimpse of an intentional activity, an educator explaining why the room is set up the way it is, a parent and educator talking easily at the gate. The message underneath is partnership. This isn't a place that takes your child and shuts the door. It's a place that works with you. When a family sees that relationship on screen, the enquiry gets warmer before they've spoken to a soul.
What this means for your centre's story
Look back over the six and the theme is impossible to miss. Comfort, communication, consistency, routine, patience, partnership. Every question a parent is coached to ask is about emotional safety and relationships, and none of it lives on your facilities page. Yet most centre websites lead with the playground and the floor plan, then answer the questions that actually decide the enrolment with a line of text, if at all.
This also solves the rating problem. If you're rated Meeting and the centre nearby is Exceeding, you can't out-badge them. You can out-warm them. Show the settling, the same faces every day, the real handovers, and a family will feel more confident about you than about a higher-rated centre they've only read about. The tour is where families decide, and the pre-visit is where you shape the tour before it happens.
There's a timing point too. Around nine in ten families begin their childcare search online, according to research from US enrolment platforms, and Australian families behave much the same way. They're forming a shortlist, and a gut feeling about each centre, long before they call. That's exactly the window these films work in. A safety questions guide and a warm meet-the-educator film sitting on your enrolment page mean a parent has already had their biggest worries answered by the time they find you online.
The practical shape of this is a small library, not one big video. Day-in-the-life films for routine and program. Meet-the-educator films for consistency and that named main carer. Short settling stories for the separation fear. Real handover moments for communication. None of it staged into something glossy and false. StartingBlocks tells parents to trust their instincts on a visit, and instincts read honesty fast. The centres that win aren't the ones with the slickest edit. They're the ones brave enough to show what an ordinary Tuesday actually looks like.
If you want to know how well your current website and videos answer these six questions, that's exactly what our free enrolment story audit looks at. We go through what a prospective parent sees today, question by question, and show you where the gaps are. No pitch, just an honest read of whether your story is doing the work before the tour.
Arek Rainczuk
Founder, EEVA