Making Sense of Child Care Liability Insurance: Understanding Risk Assessment, Compliance, and Cost by Mia Pritts and Mark Parker

Insurance costs are rising, and for many child care providers, the reasons behind those increases can feel unclear, inconsistent, and out of their control. In this timely session, we’ll explore how licensing inspection data is often used by insurers to assess risk—and why approaches based primarily on counting violations can miss the bigger picture of program quality, safety, and consistency.

Participants will examine how these practices can unintentionally penalize providers, contribute to rising liability insurance costs, and create additional challenges for programs already working hard to maintain high standards of care. The session will also introduce a more collaborative and transparent approach to evaluating compliance, one that considers the severity of regulations, applies more consistent scoring practices, and tracks patterns over time to support fairer and more reliable risk assessment.

Designed as a participatory conversation, this session invites providers, administrators, and agency staff to think together about what needs to change. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the problem, a practical framework for rethinking risk and compliance, and concrete ways to contribute to a growing grassroots effort to improve child care liability insurance outcomes.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Analyze how licensing inspection data is commonly used by insurance carriers and identify the limitations of violation-count-based risk assessments.

• Compare traditional inspection reporting with a weighted, more universal scoring approach to understand how severity and context influence risk interpretation.

• Apply at least one strategy for using compliance data more effectively in conversations with insurers, regulators, or organizational partners.