Where our listings come from
Most family listings sites charge venues to appear, which quietly decides what you get to see: the big paid day out is on there, the free library rhyme time never is. We do it the other way round. We collect events from the organisations that run them and nobody pays us a penny to be included. Every source on this page is checked again overnight, so a session cancelled today is off the site tomorrow.
Every source we carry
Counted from what is actually live on the site right now, not from what we hoped to collect.
| Source | Events listed |
|---|---|
| Checked and written by us | 30 |
| Oldham Libraries and Heritage | 66 |
| Lancashire Wildlife Trust | 33 |
| Wigan Libraries | 32 |
| Z-arts, Manchester | 29 |
| Manchester Libraries (Library Live) | 16 |
| Cumbria Wildlife Trust | 11 |
| Storyhouse, Chester | 11 |
| The Ice Cream Farm, Tattenhall | 7 |
| HOME, Manchester | 6 |
| Octagon Theatre, Bolton | 6 |
| Blackburn Cathedral | 5 |
| Ribble Steam Railway, Preston | 5 |
| All Saints | 4 |
| Salford Community Leisure | 4 |
| Blackpool Grand Theatre | 3 |
| Barnoldswick: Holy Trinity | 2 |
| National Museums Liverpool | 2 |
| Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester | 2 |
| The Met, Bury | 2 |
| A warm welcome to St Cuthbert's | 1 |
| All Saints' Church Madeley | 1 |
| Barnoldswick: St Mary le Ghyll | 1 |
| Oakworth Parish Churches Christ Church Oakworth & St. John's Newsholme | 1 |
| St. Margaret's | 1 |
How it works
A job runs through every source on the list above, takes the facts (what, where, when, how much), works out roughly who it suits, and throws away anything that is not for children. One council library calendar alone carries several thousand events, and most of them are adult reading groups and job clubs. Everything that survives keeps a link back to whoever published it, so you can always check the original.
Events carry a start and an end date and drop off the site the day after they finish. Nothing here is kept alive past its date to pad the numbers.
What we deliberately do not do
- We do not take payment for a listing, or for a better position in one.
- We do not republish anyone’s full write-up. We keep the facts and a couple of sentences at most, and every listing links straight back to whoever wrote it, so they get the visit and the booking. Where a venue has described its own event better than we could, those are their words, shortened and credited.
- We do not scrape rival listings sites. Everything here comes from the organisation actually running the event.
- We do not collect from anyone whose terms say not to, even where the data would be useful, and we have removed sources over it. If something is missing that you would expect to see, that is usually why.
One gap we should be upfront about
We have a direct feed from the Church of England’s national platform because one exists. There is nothing equivalent for mosques, gurdwaras, temples or synagogues, so children’s activities at those places only reach us if they are also on a council or venue calendar. That is a gap in what is available to collect rather than a decision we made, but it is still a gap. If you run activities for children at a place of worship of any faith, send us your calendar and we will list it.
Run something we have missed?
If you run children’s activities anywhere in the North West and you are not on here, we would rather list you than not. Email hello@kidzdays.co.uk with what, where and when. It costs nothing and it always will.
If you would rather we did not list your events, say so at the same address and we will take them out and keep them out. Details of our crawler are on the bot page.