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Cost Controls and Supply-Side Funding: What Does Quebec Do?

As provinces and territories move towards $10 a day child care, they have committed themselves to creating new funding systems that implement cost controls on child care operators.  You’re probably wondering what the heck that means. Well, child care in Canada outside Quebec is being transformed from being funded mostly by parent fees to being funded mostly by direct funding from the government to child care operators.  In return for the provision of specific services, child care operators get operating funding, often known as supply-side funding.   These child care operators also commit to lowering their parent fees, eventually down to …

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Is Ontario About to Violate the Early Learning and Child Care Agreement it Signed?

Not-for-profit and public services are at the heart of Ontario child care.  Overall, they care for more than three-quarters of our children in licensed child care.  For children 0-5 years of age, that number has been 70% of children compared to 30% in commercial child care arrangements. I guess that’s why Ontario didn’t fuss too much about agreeing with the federal government that this percentage – at least 70% not-for-profit and public – would stay the same when licensed child care moves to $10 a day by 2026.  In March 2022, Ontario signed an agreement with the federal government to …

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Wages of Early Childhood Educators and Assistants in Ontario

This table below supports the chart in my presentation to the recent (Jan 5, 2023) Building Blocks for Child Care webinar on child care expansion in Ontario. It is posted nearby on this website. The table and chart show the essential problem behind recruitment and retention problems of early childhood educators. Their wages are too low to attract many more educators. In essence, the average wage paid to early childhood educators is much lower than the hourly wages paid to workers in other occupations requiring a college education. Early childhood educators are paid as if they had only a high …

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Are the Wages of Early Childhood Educators Competitive With Other Occupations?

Young women and men make career decisions early in life based upon their capabilities, their interests and the amount of money they might expect to earn.  If there are shortages of early childhood educators, wage levels need to be increased to recruit more educators and retain the ones you have. Why do we have a huge problem recruiting and retaining staff in licensed child care across Canada?  Fundamentally, it is because the wages of early childhood educators and assistants are not competitive with other occupations that require a college education.  Simple as that, really. This first table shows the latest …

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How much do Early Childhood Educators earn?

How much do Early Childhood Educators earn?  Everyone knows that their wages are low – too low – but it’s hard to find a reliable source of data to make wage comparisons.  One very interesting data source is a Government of Canada web site called Job Bank (www.jobbank.gc.ca).  It’s a web site designed to help people find jobs and plan their careers by providing information.  And it has a lot of data on many different occupations in many different geographic locations in Canada. The data on Early Childhood Educators comes from the Labour Force Survey, a monthly survey conducted by …

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Child Care Wages and Workforce Strategies – Looking at Australia: What Do They Have That We Need?

Canada has a crisis on its hands – a child care workforce crisis.  Already, child care operators across the country are unable to find staff; rooms are closing and centres are closing because of the inability to attract and retain early childhood educators.  That’s BEFORE the estimated need for 60,000 new early childhood educators as we move to $10 a day child care.  Australia is not the first country that springs to mind when looking for child care policies to emulate.  For instance, Australia funds child care with vouchers that encourage the growth of the for-profit sector and lead to …

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Do You Want to Know How to Make Child Care Expansion Happen in Ontario?

I’m done some work recently with Building Blocks for Child Care (B2C2) on how to facilitate the expansion of not-for-profit and public child care in Ontario. They are an organization that knows a lot about all the different steps necessary to expand child care services – planning, design, rules and regulations, financing. With their advice, I wrote a primer called How to Make Child Care Expansion Happen in Ontario, giving 10 recommendations for action in Ontario to make not-for-profit and public child care grow. Briefly, they are: A system of capital grants and loan guarantees for not-for-profit and public operators …

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Accessibility and Quality of Child Care Services in Quebec

These (link below in next paragraph) are slides from a recent webinar presentation I made along with colleagues from Équipe de recherche Qualité des contextes éducatifs de la petite enfance at UQAM. You can listen to the French version of my talk  https://youtu.be/R-JIAjvfQew or the whole webinar https://qualitepetiteenfance.uqam.ca/evenement/leducation-a-la-petite-enfance-sinvite-dans-la-campagne-electorale-27-septembre-2022/ But, I have also reproduced most of that talk in English here: Christa Japel has also done similar work here https://childcarecanada.org/blog/learning-experience-access-and-quality-qu%C3%A9bec%E2%80%99s-profit-child-care

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Give Them an Inch and They’ll Take a Mile: The Story of For-Profit Child Care in Ontario

The Ministry of Education in Ontario is beginning to understand that they really can’t satisfy for-profit child care providers with anything less than the full cake and eat it too.  The Ontario government has bent over backwards to accommodate the for-profit child care operators; they want them to opt into the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system.  What has the Ministry done so far for the for-profit operators? It changed the regulations so that municipalities (mandated to be Service System Managers) no longer have the discretion to sign purchase-of-service agreements only with not-for-profit providers (16 of the 47 …

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