Childminding Website? Help please.

[PreggoK8]

Hello ladies.
My mum's a chidminder in the SK4 area and the little boy she minds is moving away in a couple of weeks. She doesn't advertise apart from a poster up at my sister's work and is looking for a new child to look after.
I heard once about a website where you can put in your details as an OFSTED registered childminder and people find you. Does anyone know which website this is so I can set her up?
Many thanks, x

childcare.co.uk is one, but there are quite a few.

Has she told Famly Information Services as they can update their database and most parents looks their first.

The Family Information Service pages for Stockport do not include all the Childminders. In fact until a couple of weeks before Christmas there had been no Childminders listed for Stockport. Parents had to ring FIS to get a paper list sent to them. I checked the uploaded list this week, and I myself am not listed. There are other Childminders I know who also are not listed. I know I sent my permission form for the new Direct gov site back several months ago so I know that isn't the reason I'm not listed

It's very annoying, especially when you have vacancies to fill.

The directgov childcare site hasn't been working properly for months. My own details appear and disappear apparently at random, and when they are there they are wrong (for example shoeing that I have no vacancies when I do, and getting my location wrong)! It would be better if it didn't work at all, because at present it appears to a parent seeking childcare that there are no childminders or no places in the area - I have had someone phone up recently to say "I know you don't have any places as I've checked on the government website but..." They could at least display a warning to say the database is incomplete and the quality of the data that is there is poor. Parents would be much better served by consulting their local Family Information Service.

Yes, I agree with minderjinx. Before Christmas when the Directgov site hadn't been set up fully, our local FIS had a note on their website asking those looking for Childcare to telephone them. Now it gives a link to the Directgov site, which leaves a great deal to be desired. It seems that some minders have just been left off. No pattern to it, it's totally random. It would have been better left as it was.

My details have reappeared on the website today - apparently correct except I'm shown as being 2 miles from my own postcode. They even have a very unhelpful map with a pin showing my location - which isn't even on a road, but in an area of open countryside. Oh, and if you look in the small print, my registration dates from 1899! But I did check a couple of friends, and they are also over a hundred years old, so I feel a bit better.

The map won't show the exact location due to some childminders now wanting parents to know where they lived. Thus why the mileage is out and the map location is out. However it will be within a few miles of actual location.
Moan to the NCMA about that if you feel it's wrong... I think they were a large part of those organisations who objected to having full postcode data used.

1899 - nice, one of the programmers probably thought it would be a good joke.

With regard to the map, the Childminders in our group who are listed are actually showing on the map exactly where they live. But several of us are not listed at all. I had a chat with our FIS today. They are really fed up with it. They uploaded all details of all Childminders in Stockport before Christmas, and checked that everyone was there when a search was carried out. They have looked today at Childminders who have disappeared and those Childminders are still showing on theFIS list; but not being picked up by the DirectGov search. The FIS IT staff have looked at our records and there is nothing there which might be causing this problem. It's totally random. This is something the local FIS has no control over. They have contacted DirectGov to ask them to sort it out.

Another issue with this site is that schools which Childminders cover are not shown, even though that is information uploaded by the FIS. So parents could call many childminders before finding one which covers their child's school. It's OK if there is only a couple of schools in your postcode area, but we have lots in our area.

At one point today all Childminders were showing as "Ofsted Registered Provider". There is no information given about any of them, so the search gives nothing to parents when this happens, (and it happens often).

The FIS site we used to have was brilliant. Why this obsession with centralisation?