Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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In December 2023 the Department launched the Early Learning and Childcare Data website. The website provides a new and innovative way of displaying administrative data as well as survey data collected annually from over 4,400 Early Learning and Care (ELC) and School Age Childcare (SAC) services across the country, to support evidence-informed policy development and planning.

This website includes a series of interactive dashboards that will be released by Pobal on behalf of the Department, including data that was previously published in the Annual Early Years Sector Profile report. The first two interactive dashboards – ‘Overview of Service Providers’ and ‘Capacity’ are now available.

The most recent capacity data for the 2022/23 programme year estimated that there were 213,154 children enrolled in ELC and SAC services, 51% of services had at least one vacant place, and 48% had a waiting list.

In the most recently released data, the indicators for monitoring capacity across the sector have been updated. The vacancy indicator has been replaced by the number/percentage of services with vacant places which is based on services reporting one or more unoccupied places for any age group.

The waiting list data gives an indication of demand for places for a given age group or service type. It cannot be used as a measure of demand as not all services operate a waiting list and an individual child may be on multiple waiting lists in different services.