https://childcare-during-covid.org

This briefing is based on findings from a UKRI/ESRC funded study ‘Childcare during Covid-19', at the Universities of Leeds and Bristol, which explored the effects of COVID-19 on early years education and care and its workforce. The study focussed on nurseries, childminders, nannies and parents and is constituted by 5542[1] survey respondents and 321 in-depth interviews over two waves between 2020-21 (https://childcare-during-covid.org/). Details of sample in appendix below.

SUMMARY

• A stable, well-qualified early years (EY) workforce is essential for high-quality education and childcare, and for the delivery of the government’s Covid recovery catch-up plans to education, including the priority area of speech and language development for under-fives, and ensuring that no child is left behind as a result of the pandemic.

• Nurseries addressed financial pressures during Covid by changing the conditions of work for their staff.

• A combination of financial strain, poor pay and worsening conditions has accelerated the loss of experienced workers from the sector – affecting nursery workers and managers and childminders. There has been a net loss of EY jobs in the sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Loss of staff from the sector, combined with increasing challenges to recruitment, have led to a workforce crisis in the EY sector.

• Morale among the workforce is very low with workers who remain in the sector feeling undervalued and unrecognized, leading to declining wellbeing and mental health.

• The changed working conditions threaten the long-term stability of its workforce, and the cost-of-living crisis is likely to have intensified this, making work in the EY sector unaffordable for many.

RECOMMENDATIONS

In order to address a retention crisis, a national early years workforce strategy is needed to:

• urgently address pay and conditions across the sector, including in private nurseries and large chains, which are experiencing the most severe staffing shortages
• develop a plan for investment in continuing EY professional development.
• develop new career frameworks which demonstrate clear paths for progression
• implement a national pay scale for early educators, which addresses ‘poverty pay’ and ensures pay progression in line with professional development and career frameworks

In order to address recruitment, a national early years recruitment campaign is needed to:

• support and promote early years education and care as offering rewarding careers in a respected profession with clear opportunities for advancement.
• convey the critical importance of early education on child development and life chances and the crucial role of early years professionals in delivering early education.
• incentivize apprenticeships and develop a targeted programme for the recruitment and support of apprentices.

In order to ensure stability of the early years workforce, the Government must:

• revise funding of entitlement hours for group- and home-based settings. Funding must cover the full cost of provision the current subsidisation of free childcare through EY workers’ supressed wages should be stopped. Annual reviews of early years funding should fully account for statutory increases in the National Minimum Wage.

• as a minimum, delink a proportion of funding from child numbers, to be replaced with core ‘infrastructure’ or ‘capacity’ funding, in order to protect settings from volatility, stabilise provision and enable future-focused investment. This may involve directly funding settings or the staff working in them.

• recognise childminders as occupying an important niche in the early years education and care sector and as a skilled workforce, who contribute to the delivery of government early childhood education objectives.

EVIDENCE: WORKFORCE CHALLENGES

Staff working in the early years sector combine a unique mix of skills and knowledge which is critical for child development and for narrowing attainment gaps in order to level life chances (Karemaker et al. 2011; Mathers and Smees 2014). While instability in the early years workforce in England predates the pandemic (Nutbrown 2012; Social Mobility Commission, 2020) disruption to the sector due to Covid-19 has intensified existing challenges for staff and staffing, creating new pressures.

Nursery settings experienced significant financial difficulties during the Covid-19 pandemic due to a reduction in fee income, with 40% (333) settings going into deficit during the period June to December 2020; and two thirds (571) taking some remedial action to remain viable in the short term. Most nurseries have mitigated this loss of income through changes to staffing levels or employment conditions, which undermine staff conditions and job quality.

Almost half (48.9%) of the nursery settings which took actions to remain operational during Covid-19 either changed staff contract conditions (19.2%) permanently cut staff (14.3%) or did not renew temporary staff contracts (13.4%) - see Table 1). Other actions included reducing staff hours (by reducing contracted hours or cutting overtime); not filling staff vacancies; reducing staff to child ratios to the statutory minimum; reducing staff wages and freezing pay.

Table 1: Staffing actions taken to respond to income loss (June to Dec 2020)

**Other included a range of responses such as reducing staff hours, child:staff ratios, pay and not filling staff vacancies.

1) Loss of staff and pipeline issues

Few nursery managers reported staff loss through redundancies (11.4% in July 2020; 5.7% in October 2021), but our research indicates that staff leaving the sector are not being replaced. Reduced staffing in the sector may be masked by reductions to contracted hours or loss of regular overtime, as we found a net loss of working hours across every setting type[2]. As one nursery worker illustrates:

I didn’t even get informed that my hours were getting cut down, I just looked at my timetable and I calculated and I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, where’s the other ten hours gone?’ (Early years educator, private nursery, Bradford). 

In January-March 2021, private nurseries were the most likely to report that they had reduced numbers of staff (32.8%) compared to before the pandemic with 27% of local authority (LA) nurseries reducing the number of staff on contract. By October 2021, a quarter (25%) of private nurseries reported reduced numbers of staff on full-time employment contracts (compared to 12% of LA nurseries and 18% of voluntary and community-run pre-schools).

Workforce changes due to Covid-19 included a sharp reduction in the number of apprentices across many nurseries. This was reported in both surveys, where around a fifth (20-21%) of nursery settings reported a decrease. Loss of these trainee staff indicates potential problems with the pipeline of qualified staff into the sector now and in the longer term.

Responses by nurseries to the financial challenges of Covid, highlighted the links between underfunding, low wages and poor quality of work in the sector. Chronic underfunding left most settings with limited or no cash reserves, so lowering staffing levels was the only flexibility they had to respond to shortfalls in income. For staff, this resulted in job loss or, for those who remained working, for many it meant the loss of hours and income, or working more intensively with more children in their care.

2) Recruitment issues

By October 2022, as demand in EY settings returned, nursery managers reported significant problems recruiting staff, with over half (55.6%) of nurseries finding it more difficult to recruit new EY workers, and a quarter (25.6%) reporting staff turnover as higher than before the pandemic.

While there was no significant association between difficulty recruiting and the spatial or demographic characteristics of nursery settings, setting type was a significant factor. Private settings (73%) and private nurseries that were affiliated to a chain (89.6%) were more likely to experience difficulties recruiting staff.

Childminders are a vital but often overlooked set of providers in the EY sector, in part because the ECEC they provide is delivered in the private space of the home. Childminders constitute 12% of the EY workforce and provide 12% of EY places in England (DfE, 2021). For many families, they offer more flexible forms of care, including wrap-around care in the early morning and late evening.

Childminders experienced a sustained reduction in demand between March 2020 and October 2021, resulting in a net decrease in working hours and income; 53% saw a reduction in the number of children they cared for and 43.7% were working fewer hours per week. This temporary decrease in demand is likely to result in the permanent loss of childminders from the sector. Childminders who were caring for fewer children, working fewer hours or earning lower incomes than pre-COVID were significantly more likely to say they were not at all confident they would remain working as a childminder.

Most respondents to our childminder survey were not confident or only somewhat confident about remaining in the sector. In January-March 2021, a fifth (20.9%) of childminders reported that they were ‘not at all confident’ they would be working as a childminder in six months, whilst 37.6% reported they were only ‘somewhat confident’. By July-October 2021 the proportion of childminders reporting they were not or only somewhat confident about remaining in the sector reduced but only very slightly to 16.6% and 34.4% respectively.

The loss of childminders from the sector will represent a substantial loss of experience and knowledge, constituting a care and brain drain. Over half (52%) of childminders who were not at all confident that they would continue working as a childminder had 10 or more years’ experience, constituting a care and brain drain from the sector. Exits from childminding will also constitute the loss of more flexible forms of care.

The majority (57.5%) who were not confident about continuing work as a childminder said they would be seeking work in a different sector, indicating the loss in experience of skill, not just from childminding but from the EY sector overall.

3) Declining relative pay

By 2022, retail wages were broadly equivalent to average early years pay. Low and declining relative wages are a primary cause of early years workers leaving the sector. Many workers earn just the National Minimum Wage with little or no scope for pay progression, with average hourly pay lower for staff working in group-based providers (£11.78/h) than school-based providers (£18.57/h) (Haux et al. 2022).

Why are people always recruiting for practitioners? ...I think one of those reasons are it’s quite a low-paid job and I would say that for the amount we get paid, we do a hell of a lot of work. It’s long hours, it’s tiring, we are putting ourselves at risk (Nursery-based educator, small private chain, Portishead)

Nurseries (particularly independent private or voluntary) report an inability to raise pay due to underfunding of “free entitlement hours”. In our study, nurseries reported widespread practices of cross-subsidising shortfalls through ‘paid-for hours’. It was widely felt that this underfunding suppressed wages in the sector. Additionally, nursery workers and childminders we interviewed frequently emphasised that the annual increases in National Minimum Wage (NMW) were not matched with proportionate increases to the rate paid by government for funded hours, increasing the disparity year on year.

Childminding was already low paid before pandemic with childminders frequently earning below the national minimum wage (NMW) (Social Mobility Commission report 2020). According to our study, average pay for childminders we surveyed dropped further during the pandemic. Despite some recovery in childminder incomes by July-October 2021, most childminders (64%) in our survey reported they had a lower income than before the pandemic. The proportion earning less than £10,000 p.a. increased from 13.4% in 2018/19 to 32% in 2020/21. During that period, childminder mean income reduced by 18.2% (from £17,532 to £14,340 p.a.). Income loss during Covid is likely to have placed many childminders below the poverty line.

Low pay continues to be a major cause of dissatisfaction among childminders, with half (49.4%) of childminders we surveyed in July-October 2021 either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the amount of pay that they receive. Given the extent of low pay in the sector revealed by our study, the cost-of-living crisis, is likely to have made working in the EY sector unaffordable for many of its lowest-paid workers.

4) Deterioration of working conditions during Covid

Long hours and demanding work with a high level of responsibility have been long-term sources of dissatisfaction in the early years sector (Social Mobility Commission, 2020). Covid-19 has changed work in ways that are likely to prompt workers to leave the sector and childminders to deregister. Workers across the EY sector reported work intensification, new duties and high levels of stress caused by working through Covid-19.

• Work intensification

During Covid19 lockdown measures, nursery workers reported undertaking                             additional duties in place of furloughed colleagues and educating higher numbers               of children where ratios were maximised. In some settings, this work intensification               has continued, but instead due to understaffing and unfilled vacancies, as outlined               above.

• New duties

Early years staff were the only face-to-face contact for many children and families               during lockdown periods when other services and agencies, such as social workers               and educational psychologists, moved their work online. As a result, they reported               taking on duties usually undertaken by other health and professional agencies, and               widening their responsibilities for safeguarding and more widely including:

• increasingly identifying cases of vulnerability, including neglect and exposure to domestic violence.
• greater involvement in identifying possible SEND in children and providing primary support for parents and carers to understand and cope with diagnoses in the absence of access to other social services.  

Early years workers have an important role to play in these processes, but interviews indicate that, in many cases, they were not adequately prepared or supported to do so and additional training and support is needed.

5) Stress and mental health

Changed working conditions, including the stress of working with the risk of Covid, and dealing with economic uncertainty and fear of job loss, led to stress and poor mental health among workers across the EY sector. Many head teachers and nursery managers reported concern about the wellbeing of their staff. By Wave 2, 82% of managers reported that their concern for the mental health and well-being of their staff had increased. For some, these changed conditions have been cause for exit, for those who remain working in the sector, there is widespread stress and burnout. Even where conditions have returned nearer to pre-pandemic levels, the strains of working through 2020-21 are likely to have a scarring effect on the existing workforce and a deterrent effect on potential entrants.

6) Job satisfaction and morale

High levels of job satisfaction have historically retained workers in early years, balancing out what is otherwise a low-paid, low-status job. There continues to be a very high level of job satisfaction from EY workers: 90% of childminders we surveyed were satisfied or very satisfied with the sense of achievement they get from their job. Nursery managers and workers also reported high levels of job satisfaction in interviews.

At the same time, the changed conditions and circumstances of working during Covid-19 has meant that these workers feel increasingly undervalued. Morale among the workforce is very low. While childminders overwhelmingly (89%) agreed that their skills were valued by the families they worked for, they felt that their work was rendered invisible in government and societal discourse about Covid19 and 68% of childminders disagreed or strongly disagreed that their skills are valued by society.

In addition to improving conditions, attention must be paid to raising awareness amongst policy-makers, parents and the general public of the vital role that early years plays in educating children, narrowing inequalities and enabling parents to engage with the labour market and employment.

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For further details, contact:

Professor Kate Hardy

Principal Investigator

Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC)

University of Leeds

k.r.hardy@leeds.ac.uk

https://business.leeds.ac.uk/divisions-work-employment-relations/staff/520/kate-hardy

REFERENCES

Department for Education (2021) ‘Survey of Childcare and Early Year Providers: Main Summary, England, 2021’. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1039675/Main_summary_survey_of_childcare_and_early_years_providers_2021.pdf

Haux et al. (2022) Early years recruitment, retention and business planning during the Coronavirus pandemic Research report: a summary of findings. Accessed at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1071843/Early_years_recruitment__retention_and_business_planning_during_the_Coronavirus_pandemic.pdf

Karemaker, A., Mathers, S., Hall, J., Sylva, K. and Clemens, S., 2011. Evaluation of the Graduate Leader Fund: Factors relating to quality: findings from the baseline study. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181483/DFE-RR144c.pdf

Mathers, S. and Smees, R., 2014. Quality and Inequality: Do three- and four-year-olds in deprived areas experience lower quality early years provision? London: Nuffield Foundation.

Nutbrown, C., 2021. Early childhood educators’ qualifications: a framework for change. International Journal of Early Years Education, 29(3), pp.236-249.

Social Mobility Commission (2020) Stability of the early years workforce in England report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/906906/The_stability_of_the_early_years_workforce_in_England.pdf

APPENDIX 1: Dataset – Surveys and interviews