How our review scores work
A score you cannot check is worth nothing, so here is the whole method. No part of it is secret and no part of it can be bought.
The score is two halves
Every score is out of 10, and it is the sum of two things:
- The average rating, up to 5 points. The mean overall rating families gave, out of 5.
- The number of positive reviews, up to 5 points. How many people rated the service 4 out of 5 or higher.
Both halves matter. Three glowing reviews say less than twenty good ones, and twenty mediocre reviews should not outrank a service families genuinely rate.
Only the last 24 months count
A review from 2019 tells you about a service that may have changed hands, changed manager and changed every carer since. So reviews stop counting towards the score after 24 months. They stay on the profile to read, and they stop moving the number.
This means a service that stops collecting reviews watches its score fall, and eventually shows no score at all. That is deliberate. The score describes the service now.
What each extra review is worth
The volume half flattens out, so the first few reviews matter most and no service can bury a bad one under a hundred good ones.
| Positive reviews in 24 months | Volume points, out of 5 |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1.42 |
| 2 | 2.43 |
| 4 | 3.68 |
| 6 | 4.32 |
| 8 | 4.65 |
| 12 | 4.91 |
| 20 | 4.99 |
What the numbers mean
- Excellent from 9.5
- Very good from 8.5
- Good from 7.0
- Fair from 5.0
- Poor from 0.0
What we will not publish
A person reads every review before it appears, and we email the reviewer to confirm it was really them. We reject anything we cannot verify, anything that names individual care workers, anything that reads like the provider or a competitor wrote it, and anything that is a complaint about a clinical matter that belongs with the CQC or the local authority safeguarding team.
We publish criticism on the same terms as praise. A provider can reply to any review for six months after it was submitted, and their reply appears underneath it.
What money cannot do
A paid listing does not raise a score, hide a review, or change how anything on this page is calculated. Paying changes where a service appears in a list and what it can add to its own profile. It does not change what families said about it.