I've been minding for years, and am more or less full with all age groups - my older schoolchildren mindees are mostly ones I've had from when they were babies, so are very much long-term.
I have very very few calls via the CIS (and, until scrapped recently, was local Vacancy Co-ordinator and still didn't get calls from CIS) - all my own placements have been through attending local groups, word-of-mouth etc.
I just tested out Google to see how easy it would be for a parent to find out where they could locate childminders in my area. I did a variety of different words (including "childminder", "childminding", "my county" etc.), with the inverted commas left out, left in, using both words - with/without inverted commas (it makes a difference!) and so on. (Do I lead a sad life or what??)
It is certainly not obvious that the CIS is the official place for parents to get their childcare information from, and the CIS was top of the sites found on only one of the variations of search words I used. It didn't come up at all on some of the searches.
In the past, I've asked non-childminding friends to do the same, just to see if I'm being stupid, but they've had similar findings.
For a parent who knows nothing about finding a childminder, it might not be that easy to find the CIS!
I think it's sad that Vacancy Co-ordinators have been phased out, because we had access to information about minders local to us that we could pass onto parents who contacted us. I (and the other Vacancy Co-ordinators in this area) will still pass parents on to minders that we know have vacancies, but we won't know anything about any new minders that start up.
Phew, that was a bit long-winded ... sorry! Pet rant over!!