If you’ve seen a daycare’s “quality evaluation result,” you may wonder what it actually measures. In Quebec, the educational quality evaluation is a distinct process run by the Ministère de la Famille — separate from compliance inspections — and it now applies to every recognized service. Here’s how it works, in plain language.
Quality evaluation vs. compliance inspection
These are two different things, easy to confuse:
- Compliance inspection checks the rules: health, safety, staff ratios, premises, documentation, and the absence of impediments. It’s about meeting legal obligations. (See our overview of what the Auditor General found.)
- Educational quality evaluation looks at the quality of the experience the child receives — interactions, planning, and environment — measured against the ministry’s reference framework, Accueillir la petite enfance.
A centre can be perfectly compliant and still score low on educational quality, and vice versa.
What the evaluation measures
The evaluation assesses several dimensions of educational quality, broadly:
- Interactions between educators and children (warmth, responsiveness, support for learning and language).
- Planning and structure of activities (intentional, varied, age-appropriate).
- The physical environment (layout, materials, how the space supports play and development).
Evaluators directly observe selected groups (notably children aged 3 to 5) on a given day, so a result is a snapshot, not a continuous score. The ministry assesses four dimensions of educational quality and has set success thresholds on three of them; below a threshold, quality is considered low and the service requires follow-up.
Who is evaluated, and when
All recognized services — CPEs, garderies, and home-based care — participate at the ministry’s request. Roughly 70% of CPEs and garderies were evaluated between 2019 and 2025. Source: Ministère de la Famille; Auditor General of Québec (May 2024), Chapter 4 (full PDF).
Where to find the results
Results are published on the ministry’s interactive map of childcare services (within the registration portal). Parents can look up a specific service and see its evaluation results. There is no public bulk dataset — results are viewable per service.
What it means for directors
Because the evaluation is a one-day observation, consistency is everything: the practices an evaluator hopes to see should be your everyday norm, not a special effort. Centres that document daily practice and plan intentionally are better positioned — see how observations become progress reports and digital daily reports.
Related reading
- What the Auditor General found about daycare quality
- What parents should ask about daycare quality
- The educator shortage in Quebec and what it means
MonGardy helps your team keep daily practice visible and consistent — the foundation of a strong evaluation. See pricing or get started; the first year is free for new centres.
