Education & Care

A stronger, more effective early care and education (ECE) workforce is essential for supporting children’s development. Yet the nation’s ECE workforce faces many challenges, including inadequate compensation that varies widely by jurisdiction, high staff turnover, and disparities in training and resources across the ECE sector. To address these challenges, states are working to implement new policies and establish new requirements to better support their ECE workforces. For instance, some states have increased the minimum wage or established salary parity policies for pre-kindergarten and K-3 teachers. Other states have set minimum qualification requirements for their child care or pre-kindergarten lead teachers.

This project aims to improve the ECE field’s understanding of the various policies and funding decisions that states are implementing to support their ECE workforces, and how these system-level changes impact ECE staff and the children they serve.

Child Trends

2022

The early childhood education (ECE) workforce plays a key role in promoting early childhood development by their interactions with young children during formative years. However, the inherent demands of the profession and the work conditions within ECE settings affect job satisfaction and overall health and well-being. This study applied the Job Demands-Resources Model (JD-R) and administered a cross-sectional survey (n = 137) to examine disparities in personal and external demands and resources that may impact job satisfaction and turnover rates among ECE staff who provide care for preschool children (3-5 years of age). These findings suggest that ECE staff experience significantly higher demands and have access to significantly fewer resources in the workplace, and that bolstering job-related resources may translate to increased job satisfaction.

Keywords: Early childhood education; Head start; Job satisfaction; Teachers; Well-being.

Charlotte V Farewell, Jennie Quinlan, Emily Melnick, Jamie Powers, Jini Puma

Early Childhood Education Journal

2022

Early educator well-being is increasingly understood as a critical ingredient of high-quality early education and care. The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened educator well-being by exacerbating existing stressors and introducing novel stressors to all aspects of early educators’ lives, and early educators have had differential access to resources to cope with these new circumstances. Using survey data collected between April and June 2020 with a sample of 666 early educators in community-based center, family child care, Head Start, and public school prekindergarten programs across Massachusetts, we document the pandemic's initial influence on educators’ sense of well-being. Adopting an ecological perspective, we consider educator-, program-, and community-level factors that may be associated with reported changes in well-being. Most educators indicated that their mental and financial well-being had been affected. These changes were not systematically associated with most contextual factors, although there was clear evidence of variability in reported impacts by provider type. These findings underscore the need to support educator well-being, as well as to create policy solutions that meet the heterogeneous needs of this essential workforce.

Keywords: Early education and care, Early educators, Early education and care workforce, Educator well-being, COVID-19 pandemic

Emily C. Hanno, Madelyn Gardner, Stephanie M. Jones, and Nonie K. Lesaux

2022

While a global understanding of teacher well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to emerge, much remains to be understood about what early childhood teachers have felt and experienced with respect to their work and well-being. The present mixed-method study examined early care and education (ECE) teachers’ working conditions and physical, psychological, and professional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic using a national sample of 1434 ECE teachers in the U.S. We also explored differences in working conditions and well-being among in-person, online, and closed schools, given the unique challenges and risks that ECE teachers may have faced by teaching in these different modalities. From the results of an online survey, we found that in the early months of the pandemic, many ECE teachers faced stressful, challenging work environments. Some were teaching in new, foreign modes and formats, and those still teaching in person faced new challenges. We found many common issues and challenges related to psychological and physical well-being across the three teaching groups from the qualitative analysis, but a more complicated picture emerged from the quantitative analysis. After controlling for education and center type, we found that aspects of professional commitment were lower among those teachers teaching in person. Additionally, there were racial differences across several of our measures of well-being for teachers whose centers were closed. Upon closer examination of these findings via a moderation analysis with teacher modality, we found that Black and Hispanic teachers had higher levels of psychological well-being for some of our indicators when their centers were closed, yet these benefits were not present for Black and Hispanic teachers teaching in person.

Keywords: COVID-19 impact; early care and education; early childhood teachers; well-being; job demands; teaching modality; racial disparity

Kyong-Ah Kwon, Timothy G. Ford, Jessica Tsotsoros, Ken Randall, Adrien Malek-Lasater and Sun Geun Kim

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

2022

The success of a child’s healthy development is largely dependent on their primary caregiver’s capacity. The 2016 Lancet Early Childhood Development Series1 highlights that efforts to support children are not likely to bear success unless they concurrently provide support for the caregivers upon whom children depend for care.

Many barriers exist to caregiving including that:

• Caregivers may lack the physical, psychological and social capacity to care for their child.
• Highly adverse conditions may introduce threats to caregiver’s well-being and their resources for caregiving.

In responding to these barriers, there is also recognition that frontline workers, who are often community volunteers and caregivers themselves, are not equipped with adequate skills to enable them to support caregiver needs.

Caring for the Caregiver (CFC) is a foundational training module that is designed to address these needs, and to complement existing maternal and child health programmes including the UNICEF/WHO Care for Child Development (CCD) Package and the UNICEF Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) Package. CFC can also be utilised as a foundational course for other sector programs whose success is dependent on caregiver and family capacity (e.g. health promotion programmes such as WASH or child protection programmes).

CFC training translates well-established evidence on how to support emotional well-being and mental health, presenting these in practical activities which encourage self-care, family engagement and social support. The training package provides curriculum for training frontline workers to address barriers to responsive caregiving and it provides supporting implementation materials for counselling caregivers.

CFC was developed for the UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office (WCARO) by expert consultants, with a series of consultations and pilot training activities in two countries: Mali and Sierra Leone.

UNICEF

2019

The InTrans project has identified five key actions that policy decision-makers, providers and leaders should undertake – in social dialogue with trade union organizations – to enhance the participation of children and families to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in times of crisis and beyond.

By interconnecting its educational, social and economic functions, ECEC can play a key supportive role in facing the crisis for all children and families, especially those who are at risk of social exclusion (Communication on Achieving the European Education Area by 2025, 2020; Council Recommendation on High Quality ECEC, 2019).

Removing structural barriers related to availability, accessibility and affordability of provision is certainly a first step to be undertaken in this direction. However, the evidence collected during the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that implementing such measures do not suffice to ensure participation of societally disadvantaged groups to ECEC. Research shows that building relationships of trust with children and families is of uttermost importance to reduce the risk of withdrawal and ensure continuity of children’s attendance.

InTrans

2021

The goal of the research ‘Bulgaria grows with its children: Building professional competences for early childhood development’ (hereinafter referred to as ‘research on the early years workforce’ and ‘the research’) is to outline the main directions for improvement of the professionalization of the early years workforce on the basis of data – quantitative and qualitative – as well as to formulate recommendations for policy development in this area.

This summary shares the main results and recommendations derived from this research.

Dr. Natalia Mihaylova and included Dr. Ivanka Shalapatova, Elitsa Gerginova, Savelina Roussinova, and Dimitar Ivanchev

2021

Early childhood development (ECD) services have a strong, positive impact on children’s development. Research from diverse contexts shows that interventions that promote nurturing care in early learning environments significantly improve childhood development and later adult outcomes. Despite increasing knowledge on the benefits of ECD, however, much remains unknown about the early childhood workforce, the range of individuals across paid and unpaid roles who provide services to young children and their caregivers across the health, nutrition, education, and social and child protection sectors. Research supports that the workforce is one of the most important factors influencing the quality of ECD services. However, key questions remain unanswered, including:

• What does the early childhood workforce need to know and be able to do in order to carry out their roles? 
• What types of training opportunities are most effective for building the knowledge and skills that the workforce needs? 
• What types of feedback does the workforce receive on their work on a daily basis? 
• What financial and non-financial incentives impact the job satisfaction of personnel?

In an effort to address these questions, the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI), a multi-stakeholder global initiative co-led by Results for Development (R4D) and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) that works to support and empower those who work directly with young children, is carrying out a series of global landscape analyses to illustrate the size and scope of the challenges faced by the early childhood workforce, while also highlighting promising practices countries have adopted in response to these challenges. Spanning a range of roles including professionals and paraprofessionals, paid and unpaid workers, and frontline workers, supervisors, and managers, from the education, health and nutrition, social protection and child protection sectors, these analyses aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the current status of the workforce worldwide.

Vidya Putcha, Denise Bonsu, and Michelle Neuman

2020

Early childhood development (ECD) services have a strong, positive impact on children’s development. Research from diverse contexts shows that interventions that promote nurturing care in early learning environments significantly improve childhood development and later adult outcomes. Despite increasing knowledge on the benefits of ECD, however, much remains unknown about the early childhood workforce, the range of individuals across paid and unpaid roles who provide services to young children and their caregivers across the health, nutrition, education, and social and child protection sectors. Research supports that the workforce is one of the most important factors influencing the quality of ECD services. However, key questions remain unanswered, including:

• What does the early childhood workforce need to know and be able to do in order to carry out their roles?
  
• What types of training opportunities are most effective for building the knowledge and skills that the workforce needs?
  
• What types of feedback does the workforce receive on their work on a daily basis?
  
• What financial and non-financial incentives impact the job satisfaction of personnel?

In an effort to address these questions, the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI), a multi-stakeholder global initiative co-led by Results for Development (R4D) and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) that works to support and empower those who work directly with young children, is carrying out a series of global landscape analyses to illustrate the size and scope of the challenges faced by the early childhood workforce, while also highlighting promising practices countries have adopted in response to these challenges. Spanning a range of roles including professionals and paraprofessionals, paid and unpaid workers, and frontline workers, supervisors, and managers, from the education, health and nutrition, social protection and child protection sectors, these analyses aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the current status of the workforce worldwide.

Vidya Putcha and Denise Bonsu at Results for Development

2020

The Home Visiting Workforce Needs Assessment Tool aims to help Ministries and government agencies reflect on the ways in which they can support personnel delivering home visiting programs across sectors for pregnant mothers and caregivers with children under 3. Drawing inspiration from the UNICEF Pre-Primary Diagnostic and Planning Tool, this tool is intended for countries with home visiting programs at either the sub-national or national levels. The scope of this tool includes home visitors who work directly with young children and their families, as well as supervisors and trainers.

You can also download the accompanying User's Guide here.

Denise Bonsu, Kavita Hatipoglu, Michelle Neuman, Vidya Putcha, Mark Roland, and Jon Korfmacher

2020