Private Childcare Provider data is acquired twice a year from Ofsted. The data is used to populate the private_childcare_provider table in the database through the import_private_childcare_providers rake task.
This data is provided by Ofsted as ODS files, the data within these needs extracting and transforming into a CSV file that can be imported into the database.
The ODS files are released on the GOV.uk statistics pages, upcoming releases for 2023 can be found at:
Files past 2023 can be found by searching for similarly named pages on GOV.uk, for example past data was available at, March 2022, released June 2022.
Downloading the file named Childcare provider level data as at 31 March 2022 at the above link for March 2022 provides an ODS file containing five sheets:
- Cover
- Notes
- Data_dictionary
- D1-_Childcare_providers
- D2-_Childminder_Agency
- D3-_Providers_left_EYR
We care about two of these sheets, D1-_Childcare_providers and D2-_Childminder_Agency. Extracting these two files to CSV files and stripping out the non-data rows gives us two CSV files that can be imported into the database.
As the exact structure of these files can differ year to year it is worth running these files through the import process locally to ensure the data is being imported correctly before committing the files to the repository. Any changes would mean that the import rake task would need to be updated to reflect the new structure, these changes would be made in the CSV row wrapper classes: