More than one third of childcare workers seeking jobs outside sector, union warns

A recruitment and retention crisis is impacting on the quality of childcare services provided despite Government supports having improved pay and conditions for workers, according to a survey conducted by Siptu.

The trade union’s Early Years Staffing Survey found that managers and owner operators continue to struggle to find staff, with 93 per cent saying the issue is having an impact on the quality of service they can provide to parents and children.

Among non-management staff, 36 per cent said they were actively looking for employment outside of the sector (down 2 per cent down on last year) with 71 per cent of this group citing low pay as the main motivating factor.

Respondents to the survey, which involved 2,112 respondents, including 442 managers or owners, also listed stress or burnout and the lack of benefits as other key reasons for them wanting to leave the sector. Some 35 per cent also said that they were not currently paid for all of the hours they work.

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Managers said retaining enough staff to maintain services was a key challenge in their day-to-day work, with 38 per cent identifying it was as the biggest issue and a further 33 per cent calling it a “significant problem”.

Fee freeze

Darragh O’Connor, campaigns officer with Siptu, which represents around 6,000 workers in the childcare and early education sectors, around a quarter of those employed, said Government supports of €173 million introduced last year made a positive impact with staff seeing their pay rise and most parents benefiting from the related freeze in fees.

However, he said the scale of the crisis in the sector meant the supports were required just to prevent a collapse in childcare and that far more needs to be done if the sector is to be able to attract and retain the numbers of staff needed to improve and maintain services.

“Obviously we welcome the fact that the fees were frozen, a lot of parents have benefited from that, I’m a parent myself and I have benefited,” he said. “But if the Government really wants to address the staffing crisis, if they want to have good quality for children and have a low turnover stuff, there are only two ways to pay for that, either increased fees or more public investment and I don’t think anyone is calling for higher fees.”

Government needs to get more actively involved in the sector, he suggested, with the issue of capital spending and the provision of buildings for the establishment of new creches and other early learning facilities crucial to the sector’s future.

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Regarding wages, Mr O’Connor said staff were relieved to receive the pay increases provided.

“There was a lot of people on the minimum wage and now the minimum is €13 an hour and there are people above that who have benefited as well, room leaders, for instance, have seen increases of €3 or €4 an hour which is clearly significant, but if the intervention hadn’t to been made, if pay wasn’t increased, it would easy to see a kind of a collapse of the sector,” he said.

He said further increases would be needed if people were to be retained in the sector “because it’s really easy for them to get employment in equivalent professions like special needs assistants or primary school teachers”.