Who can be listed
Museums, galleries, science and discovery centres, public and independent libraries, archives, theatres and arts venues with children's programmes, botanic gardens, nature reserves and heritage sites with education provision, and non commercial learning organisations running programmes for children. Organisations must have a physical location or a named public programme.
What must be disclosed
Checked before publication and rechecked every twelve months: the registered or trading name and any charity or company number; the address of the venue or programme; what the children's provision actually consists of, described without superlatives; the age range served; the cost to a family, including whether free provision exists; access provision, including step free access and any quieter or relaxed sessions; and a named contact with a role.
Rates
Standard listing
One organisation, one location, twelve months. Alphabetical placement, labelled as a paid listing.
Additional location
A further venue or programme under the same organisation, twelve months.
Registered charity rate
Applies to any organisation with a registered charity number, for the standard listing.
These are the only prices on this website. They are set by the publisher and are the same for everybody in a category. There is no negotiation, because a negotiated price is a position by another name.
What the money cannot buy
It cannot buy position: the order is alphabetical and is not altered. It cannot buy a mention in an article. It cannot buy a link in editorial. It cannot buy a score, a badge, a star or the word recommended. It cannot buy sight of anything before publication. It cannot buy the removal of accurate material. It cannot buy influence over any evidence framing anywhere on this site, and that sentence is the reason the framing device carries no advertising of any kind on the page it appears on. It cannot buy the newsletter list, which is never shared.
What we will not list at any price
Published, because a page about what money can buy is incomplete without it.
- Anything selling a developmental or educational outcome to parents: tutoring franchises, enrichment programmes and classes marketed on accelerating a child's development.
- Toy, book, app, subscription box and equipment retailers, and anything with an affiliate programme.
- Baby and child products of any kind, including sleep, feeding and developmental aids.
- Any clinical or quasi clinical service: assessment, screening, therapy, diagnosis, or anything offering to identify a difficulty in a child.
- Milestone tracking apps and developmental checklists.
- Anything making a claim about improving intelligence, attention, memory or school readiness.
- Any organisation that asks for a change to these rules, requests a favourable position, or makes payment conditional on editorial treatment. The fee is returned in full.
Applying
Write to us through contact with the disclosures above. We will check them, and we will say no if they do not check out. A refusal on those grounds is not a judgment about the organisation's quality, which we are not in a position to make.