New research calls on government to fund better pay in early years

A strong early years workforce is essential to children, families and the wider economy.

New research published by the Early Education and Childcare Coalition and Leeds University Business School finds that poor pay in early years is impacting parents’ view of quality and calls on Government to introduce a 10-year workforce strategy to support the Best Start in Life mission.

The Model for Change, which forms part of the three-year research programme Building the Early Education Workforce, looks at early years work in Australia, Canada and Ireland as well as comparable feminised professions here in the UK such as nursing, teaching and adult social care. It calls for a new 10-year workforce strategy that reforms funding, boosts pay, improves data collection and sets out clear career pathways that will raise the status of the profession.

The release follows research last month by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) showing that the early years workforce has only increased by 600 people in the last year, putting the Government well short of its 35,000 target for 2025. A recent survey of early years providers by Early Years Alliance also found that 42% of childcare staff are actively considering leaving the sector with 78% saying they feel undervalued by government as a contributory factor.

Sarah Ronan, Executive Director of the Early Education and Childcare Coalition, said:

If we want our children to succeed, we must ensure that the people caring for them are supported to do the same. It’s great that certain groups of parents are seeing their childcare fees fall, but what about the cost of living for those working in childcare? They are among the lowest paid in the labour market, many reliant on universal credit themselves to make ends meet.

Pay is shorthand for value and it says a lot about how society values the early years and our youngest children that we are content with paying early educators minimum wage or close to it.

Continued underfunding keeps pay low and is eroding training and progression opportunities. This research has showed us that parents see this as being an indicator of quality.

The Best Start in Life Strategy is an ambitious and welcome mission statement but it was light on detail about the workforce. We need a comprehensive workforce strategy that addresses funding, pay and training if the Government is going to deliver on the promise of giving every child the best start in life.”

The research team at the University of Leeds found that there are several common themes across countries that enacted workforce reform:

• Comprehensive, long-term and ambitious workforce strategies were designed in consultation with a broad base of stakeholders.
• Improved and publicly available data was central to understanding the effectiveness of reforms and where to target them.
• Funding reform linked to pay and qualifications was key. In most countries this included at least a partial move to supply-side funding to cover time spent on training or incentivise improved pay.
• Pay-setting structures can help to ensure pay rises with inflation and strengthen progression and professional identity.
• Professional registers are just one tool and can’t, on their own, improve status. They must be accompanied by investment in pay and training.
• Shared language matters and it needs to be role-modelled by government. However, without structural reform, it can appear tokenistic.

Commenting, Kate Hardy, Professor of Global Labour at the University of Leeds, said:

“Staff working conditions are children’s learning conditions and investment in the early years workforce is the missing piece of the puzzle in improving outcomes access to and quality of early years. The government is committed to expanding families’ access to early years and that is great, but the entire sector depends on the hard and highly skilled work of early years staff and yet there has been no strategy to date to support them.

We know that the first 1000 days of a child’s life are the most important and that we already have a committed, knowledgeable workforce who can intervene to make the most of this critical time. But we need a system that parents can believe in and that is just for staff. And the starting point for that is improved pay, recognition and job quality.

Parents say that knowing that staff are underpaid and overworked undermines their confidence in the safety of early years and the ability of settings to deliver the early education their children need and deserve. We need a public conversation about the benefits of early years, but it is funding reform which is vital for this. This would enable public funds to support training, development, retention and pay progression to support our youngest children and is not simply sucked up into corporate profits”.

As part of this work, the Coalition has launched EECC Connect, a new network bringing together those who want to stay informed about developments across early education and childcare, engage with the Coalition’s work and mobilise around campaign moments.

The full report and Model for Change are available on the EECC website.

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Press queries: press@earlyeducationchildcare.org

About the Early Education and Childcare Coalition (EECC): The EECC unites the voices of all those with a stake in the future of early education and childcare – children, parents, providers, the early years workforce and the business community. We share a single vision of a world-class early education and childcare system that offers all children access to high-quality, inclusive early education that is affordable for the parents, with good funding, pay and conditions for the people delivering that provision. www.earlyeducationchildcare.org