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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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FOUR URGENT STEPS TO BETTER CHILD CARE HEALTH

The second theme in today’s publication by IRPP (see earlier blog post for the first) is what needs to happen now to make sure that $10 a day child care works out for families and children. There’s a tsunami of additional demand for child care on the horizon as child care fees plummet and we’re not ready for it. Many provinces have not placed much emphasis on expansion of not-for-profit child care spaces and haven’t provided the funding or tools necessary to make it happen. In today’s publication, which is available here… IN ENGLISH:  https://irpp.org/research-studies/early-learning-and-child-care-in-canada/  IN FRENCH:  https://irpp.org/fr/research-studies/apprentissage-et-garde-des-jeunes-enfants-au-canada/ … I …

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Comparing Then and Now: Child Care and Child and Family Benefits

Here’s a quick summary of some key conclusions from my new study published by IRPP today – Early Learning and Child Care in Canada: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Going? IN ENGLISH:  https://irpp.org/research-studies/early-learning-and-child-care-in-canada/  IN FRENCH: https://irpp.org/fr/research-studies/apprentissage-et-garde-des-jeunes-enfants-au-canada/ Factor Progress Description Child care spaces Positive There were a lot more licensed child care spaces in 2019 than there were in 1986 — 7 times as many — serving a fairly stable number of children. Children in centre care Positive The popularity and acceptance of licensed centre-based child care has increased dramatically. Back in the early 1980s, only about 10% of …

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What Should We Look for in Ontario’s Child Care Agreement?

How should we judge whether the new Ontario child care agreement with the federal government is a good one?  There are many things to look for; I’ve written about this before.  Yet, if I boil it down, the key concern is how quickly Ontario is able and willing to expand services – moving towards a quality universal system of child care for preschool children.  There are two issues here.  First, does Ontario have an ambitious plan to expand not-for-profit licensed capacity?  We know that Ontario will eventually need between 200,000 and 300,000 additional child care spaces.  We also know that …

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My Recent Presentation on Child Care Affordability

The Institute for Gender and the Economy recently sponsored a workshop on Care Work in the Recovery Economy. I did a short presentation with slides looking at Alberta’s new child care policies – following on the funding agreement with the federal government. Do the new policies get us to $10 a day? Are low-income families still disadvantaged with the burden of child care costs? I thought you might like to see the slides and draw conclusions. And how about this neat graphic provided to me after the workshop by the workshop organizers!! It summarizes some of my main themes.