Australia is facing a crisis at its childcare centres with severe staffing shortages putting the safety of children and babies at risk, say early childhood educators.
Centres across the country are struggling to fill thousands of available positions as educators leave due to post-pandemic burnout and the sector’s notoriously low pay.
More than 90% of centres have a current staff vacancy and half of those have three or more, according to a survey of staff at 1,000 centres provided exclusively to Guardian Australia.
According to educators and experts the crisis has led to:
• An increase in casual staff who are unfamiliar with children standing in for permanent employees
• New starters being forced to learn ‘on the job’
• Extra workloads on staff leading to exhaustion and risking errors at work
• Nearly 10% of childcare centres in the country operating with a waiver from the regulator meaning ratios of educators to children are relaxed
The survey of staff at 1,000 centres across Australia, conducted by the United Workers Union (UWU), found two-thirds of respondents believed the staff shortages have affected the wellbeing or safety of children, and nearly a quarter of those believed the safety of children was now “at risk”.
Annie Mok, a Melbourne educator with 30 years experience, believes it is only a matter of time before a serious incident occurs because of the loss of experienced staff.
“It … absolutely [has] an effect on safety,” Mok says.
Centres are increasingly reliant on casual agency staff who are not familiar with the children, she says. In this environment “you are more likely to have accidents happen”.
“It increases the risk of things going wrong.”
“Before the crisis, if you put an ad out for an educator, you’d get a lot of applicants, and you could interview and pick the best one,” Mok says.
Now, centres are “lucky if anyone applies” and are inclined to “take whoever comes through the door because they’re desperate for staff”.
New starters – when centres can find them – are being trained on the job, often by junior staff, she says. The result is an ongoing dilution of skill and experience.
Respondents to the UWU survey reported “a lack of adequate supervision, a higher number of incidents resulting in injuries between children [and] more errors made by staff due to exhaustion and workload” as a result of the shortages.
The director of early education at UWU, Helen Gibbons, said the survey results were damning.
“Children’s safety and education is being put at risk in a sector that is at breaking point,” she says. “This cannot go on.”
A sector in ‘gradual collapse’
Australia’s early childhood education system is fraying at the seams. Fees are rising faster than inflation. Families spend months, sometimes years, on waitlists often only to get far fewer hours than they need. And staff are leaving in droves.
Those who are hanging on say the system has been going through “gradual collapse and growing crisis”.
“I have seen too many colleagues leave the profession altogether,” says Tracey, a Sydney educator. “My current centre, which I cannot praise highly enough, has desperately struggled to replace people who have left.
“In my room alone, three diploma-qualified educators resigned in the year and a half I have been there – one to pursue a different career. In their place we have had one part-time diploma-qualified educator.
“We are making up the remainder of the mandated staff-to-child ratio with agency staff. This is hard for the children and it goes against the consistency and attachment we strive for with children in our charge.”
The ratio, which is mandated by the childcare regulator, requires that there is one educator for every four children in rooms where babies under two are cared for. The ratio gradually increases as children get older.
But at the end of July, nearly 10% of childcare centres in the country were operating with a waiver from the regulator saying they were exempt from the ratio because they cannot fill vacancies.
According to the regulator, long daycare centres are the worst affected, with 17% around the country operating under a waiver, up from 5.7% at the end of 2017.
In some areas, such as the Baulkham Hills and Hawkesbury region in outer Sydney, staffing waivers cover nearly a quarter of all services, including 37.8% of long daycare centres.
UWU’s research showed that nearly a quarter of centres were using agency staff daily to meet minimum legal ratios. Another 13% were using them weekly.
In rural and regional areas, where they did not have access to agency staff, centres were resorting to other means of managing, including closing early or partially closing the centre, turning children away, combining different age groups or “shuffling children around the rooms”.
Compromised care
Multiple staff vacancies remain at Tracey’s centre, but she says they cannot get enough candidates even to interview.
She says many of the agency staff that come into the centre are “not job-ready” and often “don’t have an instinct for basic things, like how to engage with a child”.
“I think safety is compromised,” Tracey says. “The child might fall off a piece of equipment, because whoever was supposed to be [watching them] at that point, wasn’t supervising as well as they probably could have.
“During the day, a child might have a tantrum or cry – if the casual person is trying to make them calm for sleep or a nappy change, they can get upset. That leaves the permanent staff to make up for that shortfall. And we are already stretched.”
Mok agrees that educators building relationships with children and learning about their idiosyncrasies was critical to a safe environment in which children learned cooperatively.
“It is a very important part of your job as a teacher to get to know each individual child and get to know the dynamics of a group of children,” she says. “You get to know their skill level and capabilities and that helps inform the safety of the environment.”
An example might be knowing whether a child has well-developed climbing skills, or how well they play with other children.
“This crisis of labour shortage absolutely contributes to the safety of kids,” she says. “The teacher-student relationship is the most important element of early childhood education.
“If the relationship isn’t strong or warm and respectful then the learning won’t flourish, safety will be compromised, and the psychological environment will be poorer than it should be.”
‘Love doesn’t pay the bills’
UWU’s Helen Gibbons says the primary issue “driving educators to leave a sector they love” is pay.
“Love doesn’t pay the bills and educators consistently tell us they can’t afford to work in a sector that pays them so poorly,” Gibbons says.
While pay has always been low, and the work has always been undervalued, Gibbons says the Covid pandemic, in which low pay was coupled with “high stress, enormous risk and a sense they were being overlooked”, was the catalyst for the current crisis.
“[Educators] haven’t come back and many more have chosen to leave. The more educators leave, the more the workload increases for those left behind,” Gibbons says.
“Government solutions have focused on the supply side. They have offered free courses and scholarships. This approach overlooks the leaky bucket. We are losing more educators than we are attracting. We have to address the elephant in the room.”
That’s wages, says Gibbons. An entry-level, diploma-qualified educator can expect to earn $29.48 under the award – or about $58,000 a year, according to the UWU.
The 5.75% increase to the award the sector received in July as part of the Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review falls far short of the 25% the union was seeking in its pre-budget submission to the federal government earlier this year.
In September, the commission gave approval for multi-employer bargaining in the sector to commence, covering 12,000 workers.
“It is essential that any funding directed at wages be in an industrial instrument that educators can enforce, and we can all rely on,” Gibbons says.
The minister for early childhood education, Anne Aly, told Guardian Australia: “The Albanese government is absolutely committed to the safety and wellbeing of all children in all settings”.
“Early childhood education services are required to operate under the National Quality Framework – which requires all providers to ensure a range of critical safety measures including that children are adequately supervised at all times,” she said.
“We’ve requested the independent Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority undertake a review of child safety arrangements under the National Quality Framework.
“We’re working with unions and the sector to retain, attract and train a highly skilled early learning workforce.”
