Foundation urges better benefits, working conditions to attract and retain child-care workers

With desperate parents in Newfoundland and Labrador struggling to find child care, an advocacy group has proposed five ways to increase the number of spaces in the province within a matter of months.

Making Space: 2023 Roadmap on Early Learning and Childcare, a report released Thursday by the Jimmy Pratt Foundation, says demand for daycare spots skyrocketed once $10-a-day child care was implemented.

Neria Aylward, the foundation's executive director, said Thursday parents are finding the odds of finding child care are stacked against them.

"[There is] way more demand than there ever has been, and there's so much pressure to expand quickly," Aylward said.

About 75 per cent of children in the province live in a child-care desert, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, meaning there are more than three children for every licensed space.

Aylward said the solution starts with better recruitment and retention of early childhood educators, known as ECEs, who often leave the sector due to low wages and poor working conditions. The report says less than half of ECEs have access to paid sick days or vacation time. 

"Because it's traditionally a job that's been done by women, it's totally devalued," she said. "Their wages are low, even though they have been increased by the provincial government, which is a great first step but it's not enough to make a living doing this and to make a career." 

The report said a new wage grid for ECEs is a step toward appropriate compensation but without reasonable benefit packages and "meaningful changes" to working conditions, current recruitment initiatives are like "turning up the tap into a leaky bucket." 

It recommends all centres introduce health and dental benefits, pensions and training, and to provide paid sick days, vacation and coffee breaks.

Aylward said the next step is to introduce a new universal and free junior kindergarten program that is based in the province's schools and co-taught by an ECE and a teacher.

The report said the province was on track to implement such a program in 2021, before progress was sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

"If all four-year-olds are moved into the schools, that opens up all of their spots for younger children and so it kind of benefits both age brackets," Aylward said, adding having junior kindergarten in the school system will also create better working conditions for ECEs.

"They're employed by the school and so they have a union, they have benefits, they have fantastic retirement packages." 

The report also recommends having the public sector drive any expansion in child-care spaces, rather than the for-profit or non-profit sectors, because they're the best to operate it and forecast demand.

It also suggests creating a dedicated strategy for increasing child care in rural areas, where publicly-funded child care can be even more difficult to to find.

The foundation also says Indigenous-led child-care programs must also be supported because some Indigenous government's can't access provincial operating grant programs because their facilities aren't licensed and sometimes regulations make it difficult to run culturally-based programs.

Aylward said that expanding a universal child care program benefits children. 

"They get to play with their peers, with early childhood educators who are trained to provide pedagogical programs," she said. "They're learning … so they will be more ready for school than kids who haven't been to these programs."

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