Building the early years and childcare workforce of the future

Despite being a critically important sector for the UK’s economy and society, childcare providers are struggling to recruit and retain staff. Delivering good quality early childhood education and care is key to enabling parents to work and contribute to economic growth, yet staff are facing longer hours and lower pay than comparable occupations for what can be more emotionally and physically demanding work.

This is not sustainable and action must be taken to improve staff satisfaction and to make those working in early years education feel more valued and supported. The pressure on the sector will only increase further as the government rolls out the funded childcare entitlement expansion over the next year, forecasting that an additional 35,000 new places for zero to two-year olds will be needed by September 2025.

The Timewise Childcare Pioneers project explored how proactive flexible working cultures could improve staff wellbeing and engagement and attract a more diverse pool of candidates – such as older workers and those with caring and health responsibilities.

Our approach

We worked with the Early Years Alliance, representing 14,00 members, and the London Early Years Foundation, representing 40 nurseries, to explore the role improved flexible working could play in tackling the current workforce crisis facing the sector, and to understand what improvements are possible without compromising the quality of education and care that meets the needs of parent and children.

Then we designed and delivered a set of activities and tools to support nurseries to be more consistent in their approach to flexible working, and to help them to consider and trial new approaches to increase the availability of quality flexible work.

Our thanks to JP Morgan Chase and Trust for London for supporting this project.

Our findings

Our initial diagnostic work found that part-time and flexible working is relatively common in childcare provider settings, and steps had been taken by both nursery providers to improve the information and support available to nursery managers to help them respond to flexible working requests fairly and consistently. However, staff felt that these arrangements were sometimes rationed, and their requests were not always seen as significant. They also felt that many managers set shift patterns without their input, and organisational needs were considered above staff needs, leaving them feeling less valued and less able to balance work and life commitments.

Head office staff and nursery managers highlighted that flexible working could make it harder to meet statutory staff-child ratios, recommended training standards, parents’ needs for flexible care, and provide continuity of care for the children. Managers are under pressure to juggle all these factors when setting schedules and are concerned that having more part-time staff and enabling flexible working patterns for some individuals would negatively impact others’ workloads.

“It’s really difficult because everything that we do is planned around ratios. And if you’ve already got a certain number of children and you’ve hit your maximum number of children with the staff that you’ve got, being flexible isn’t always possible.”
Nursery manager

“Flexible work works better in some types of settings than others. It depends very much on types of funding and types of hours parents need… More affluent areas means less availability of the 15 hour entitlement for two-year-olds, with an increasing focus on parents working three long days a week and wanting Monday and Friday off. Staff say Tuesday to Thursday are very mixed days and then Friday is half empty and Monday mixed. This has particular implications [for nurseries] as often the parents who want this have babies, and baby care needs high ratios and consistent care. Nannies and grandparents are also in the mix in different proportions in different settings.”
Director, nursery group

We found that leaders, managers and staff in nursery settings were keen to make improvements to their flexible working offering to help retain and attract staff, provided operational challenges could be overcome. With limited capacity to pilot new approaches due to high workloads and staff shortages, our project focused on improving the confidence, skills and knowledge gaps of nursery managers with a set of resources and tools.

Our recommendations for providers

• Move from a reactive to an open, proactive, whole-setting approach to flexible working. This starts by engaging with employees to better understand their preferences and enable them to input into the scheduling process, with shared responsibility for ensuring organisational needs are met.
• Better understand and increase the scope for flexible working patterns by analysing the impact of childcare demand in their setting on employee needs.  This should provide understanding of quiet times over a day and a week, and in doing so open up scope for staggered start and finish times, term-time only and part-time hours, among others.
• Explore models that maintain high quality and continuity of care while facilitating more flexible working – such as having a second key person per child, with time allocated for staff handovers and communication across the whole setting and models of practice that ensure strong communication with parents outside of handovers.
• Larger nursery groups should seek to role model good practice by developing progressive organisational policies and sharing their findings to enable other smaller providers to replicate and learn from their example.

Our recommendations for local government

• Local authorities should make flexible working a focus of their continuous professional development (CPD) offer for local early childhood education and care providers. Many councils seek to promote quality by providing CPD for local providers. Councils should promote approaches that improve access to flexible working for all staff, rather than increase the use of casualised staff, by disseminating evidence, guidance and case studies. Our project also suggests the value of bringing managers from different settings together to explore the benefits of flexible working and how to overcome barriers to change.

Our recommendations to national government

• Timewise is calling for a recruitment drive based around part-time and flexible working to help attract new talent to early years sector – as well as stemming the existing talent drain. The Government’s planned review of the early childhood education and care provision and workforce and resulting plan should include improving access to flexible working as a key strategic pillar and consult extensively with the sector on how to achieve this. In doing so, the Department for Education should draw on the example of the NHS Long-term Workforce Plan and the NHS People Promise which sets out a commitment to flexible working, stating: ‘We do not have to sacrifice our family, our friends or our interests for work’.   
• The DfE must help ensure the early education and childcare sector has a comprehensive package of support (training, funding and guidance materials) to ensure it is prepared to implement new employment law reforms, including ‘flexible working by default’. Innovation funding could help to enable providers to pilot models of practice that support improvements in flexible working for staff while maintaining high levels of quality for parents and children.
• The Department for Education should develop more consistent evidence and resources to support providers to enable improvements in flexible working without compromising children’s wellbeing – by establishing a new survey of the childcare workforce and investing in research on children’s attachments at different ages and for children with SEN.
• Future funding reforms should consider the need for some ‘slack’ in staffing levels to be built into provider rates to facilitate innovation and create more space for staff training and development – and to do so without reducing staff-child ratios.

What’s next?

The project showed that it is possible to improve flexible working in the childcare sector, and that this can be one part of a solution to current workforce challenges. However, it also highlighted the need for practical support to help employers implement changes in a sector where funding constraints and acute staff shortages are limiting the capacity for innovation.

If flexible working is to be adopted more widely across the sector, it is clear that concerted action is needed at both local and national level.

RESOURCES

Published November 2024