The Missing Piece in ECE Staff Retention

There are global workforce challenges affecting the childcare industry, and research on the reasons for these challenges and how to retain quality staffing proliferates the internet.

I have found a plethora of blogs, articles, and books about strategies to improve the culture in childcare centres, most espousing the importance of providing a fun and friendly environment to attract and retain staff. Ideas around how to incentivize RECEs and ECAs through gifting, paying for education or required documentation, and higher wages are abundant and do have some validity.

However, one key factor that seems to be missing from the common discourse across the internet is the importance of leadership in attracting and retaining staff. In this blog, I will discuss the role of leadership in staff retention.

Succession Planning

Leadership development is a market that remains a gap when speaking about the niche market of early childhood education. Leaders have limited relational-focused groups in Ontario, and there is a need for emergent leaders to learn how to be a leader. Many centre directors have a passion for working with children, but that alone does not mean that they will be good leaders. Leadership skills take time to build and develop. Focus on teaching leadership to plan for succession in the future. There is a steep learning curve in your role, and remember that the pull towards working with children again is often strong once an emergent but untrained leader is placed in a directorship or assistant director role. Two areas in particular for emergent leaders to train on are how to create a supportive environment and being a high-quality mentor.

Pour time into new staff

New and younger educators need frequent reminders that childcare is more than merely supervising. Giving inexperienced educators a deep knowledge of the whole child is much more challenging than most leaders recognize. Often, educators are told or tell peers what needs to be done, but there is not time to explain why. These explanations are important, such as why we wipe a child’s nose and then wash both the child’s hands and your hands afterwards…it is hygienic! Newer staff need more information and scaffolding around their practices.

Developing a trusted mentorship with new educators will provide a safety net that allows them to ask questions. Encourage new staff to research on their own and then return with questions. Remember that educators need support to understand why tasks are completed in a specific manner; it cannot just be assumed that an individual will know.

Begin to give new staff opportunities to apply new skills and lessons without your presence. Subsequently, set up an observation and watch your new educator or young teacher apply their new knowledge with you in the room watching. Then set up coaching afterwards in a 1-2-1 meeting.

Competing Priorities

Everyone in the centre is extremely busy when they are doing their jobs to the fullest. Multi-tasking is difficult in the ECE role, and when job responsibilities arise that are not directly related to prioritizing the education and the care of the children, stress will rise.

For ECEs, the additional tasks of cleaning, paperwork, checklists and observations are often stressors.

For leaders in childcare centres, there is regular evening and weekend work, from staff planning to parent communication, policy writing to organizing professional development. These responsibilities are often considered too much for one person to handle within a typical work week.

Hope

Leadership is an evolving learning process. One key strategy for retaining staff is to focus on informal coaching relationships. This can create a mutually beneficial outcome for both the leader and employee. The development of a trusting and respectful professional relationship assists in the reduction of work-related stress for the educator.

I hope that these ideas around retention both give insight and are valuable to your own leadership practice. If you would like to further discuss the topic of leadership development, mentorship, or staffing, please feel free to contact me.

Warm regards,

Greg Dixon