Collecting Data on Child Care Supply in Real Time: A New Approach to Data Collection

Currently available data on child care supply is often a few years old and does not count vacancies in all ECE sites, nor can it be accurately sorted by age of child or length of day or location or price. An OppEx brief summarizes ground-breaking work to address these challenges via an industry data standard for tracking child care supply that can be scaled across all ECE settings—regardless of who funds or regulates the program.