Dr. Barry Forer is a research methodologist and statistician specializing in early childhood education and care, as well as children’s developmental health. His Ph.D. was completed in the Measurement, Evaluation, and Research Methodology program at the UBC Faculty of Education. Since 2009, he has been a Research Associate at the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), a research- and knowledge mobilization-focused institute at the UBC School of Population and Public Health. Dr. Forer also has 37 years of experience as a research consultant in early childhood education and care, representing more than 70 projects at the local, regional, provincial, national, and international levels. Most recently, he worked with the Childcare Resource and Research Unit to conduct two national surveys (2020 and 2021) on the impacts of COVID-19 on child care services. In 2018 and 2019, he completed two child care survey projects for the City of Vancouver, the first on wages and working conditions and the second on preschool usage patterns. He also recently co-led child care needs assessments for the UBC Neighbourhood Association (2016) and for the United Way in the Tri-Cities area (2017).

On the national level, Dr. Forer was a member of the federal Expert Panel on Early Learning and Child Care Data and Research (2019-2021), and is a member of Statistics Canada’s Expert Advisory Group on Child Care (2018-present). On the first pan-Canadian study of child care wages and working conditions (Caring for a Living, 1992), he was the lead researcher; on the second such study (You Bet I Care!, 2000), he was involved in the survey design, the main statistical analyses, as well as follow-up studies on recruitment/retention and the relationship between auspice, unionization and child care quality. Dr. Forer worked on several child care workforce-related projects for the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council, and has conducted multiple child care-related analyses using the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Finally, he has been a co-author on the biennial publication Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada since 2008.