Staff turnover in child care centres?

How Do We Stop The Churn And Burn In Child Care Centres
- and what effect is it having on our children?

By Sophie Cross

One of the most frequent complaints about child care centres from parents is about the high turnover of staff and the effect that may have on children in their care.

It is an industry wide problem, and a serious one, felt more keenly in some child care services than others depending on their situation, size and setup.

Depending on the source it's widely believed that up to 30-40% turnover is not unusual, but some child care centres and services fare better than others.

Ginie Udy, CEO of SDN Children's Services, a large child care organization with child care centres all over NSW and the ACT reckons their centres run at around 20% and attributes high turnover in the industry to a number of different factors:

"There are so many facets to this problem and a lot of it has to do with how we as a community value child care workers", says Udy. "We need to look at what sort of social and financial investment we're all prepared to contribute in order to improve and stabilize the industry and make being a child care worker a career that's highly regarded, rewarding and has real potential for progression".

Udy says the child care industry can be compared to the aged care industry in Australia and in many other countries:

"There are sprinklings of highly qualified professionals in every service, but there are also some completely untrained/unqualified workers", she says. "These workers may be dedicated and experienced, but they're not qualified or necessarily trained. Those who have studied early child hood education at university and are qualified teachers are reasonably well paid at a professional pay level, but not as much as a teacher in a school. Then there are the Diploma/TAFE qualified carers, Cert 3 people and then other workers who have no training at all, so there's a huge mix of people and we need to look at how all their work is valued and remunerated. Staff need to be valued and have some sense of progression prospects to want to stay at a centre".

Child Care is also the sort of industry that attracts many female workers who are looking for something that gives them flexibility for their own family life, so there is also a much higher incidence of staff on maternity leave than in other industries.

Udy says that her organization has a number of staff off on leave at any one time, together with younger females who want to go and travel, work in other countries and gain different experience.

So how can we address this issue? Is it something that can be rectified or is it just the nature of this particular industry?

Udy believes that if we want to see real improvements and in order to help address child care shortage, staff retention and also help support working families, the Government and the community need to view the child care industry as an investment similar to the school system.

Society and families with children in the system need to understand that someone has to pay for the higher qualification of staff, career prospects and therefore better retention levels and to make it a better choice for men and women as a viable and long term career.

"What's the career path? Where's the development?" asks Udy. "In other industries it's easier to see the stepping-stones, but in most child care centres there's really just the two levels, the child care workers and the centre director".

"At SDN, being a larger organization, we have a lot of layers, so we do have career opportunities", she says, "and we also do a lot of work with children with special needs and also with the Aboriginal community. We also help our staff with their own development, supporting them to gain higher qualifications, offering financial recognition and study leave and we employ our own learning and development manager to oversee all this".

"We have a lower turnover than most, but our fees are not the lowest, because all of this structure and support requires funding and that's something that the wider community needs to understand. We need to front up as a society in terms of paying for it in taxes etc, just as we do for the education system".

Are our children at risk of being psychologically damaged by the carers leaving? Well, that depends on many different factors: how the centre is run and what structures are put in place for to reduce staff turnover; how the departure of staff is managed on an individual basis and what sort of relationship that carer has built up with the children in the first place.

When it comes to actually managing the frequent churn of child care workers, the situation again is not straight forward, but can be managed if a child care centre is running its team and environment in such a way that it limits the negative impact of a child care working leaving.

"There's a lot of research and investigation into the contributing factors to quality care", says Udy. "In my view there are three main components: Providing a sense of continuity, predictability, safety and trust; Providing a warm, responsive interaction between the caregivers and the children and a genuine interest in the individual children and their personalities; And finally, providing a challenging environment – with a focus on learning and development".

There's no denying that it's hard to meet these factors if there's high turnover. However Udy believes that this can be managed positively by putting certain measures in place: explaining the departure of the outgoing carer and sending them off, as well as by welcoming in the new carer who will hopefully also have be as warm and engaging as the previous one.

"We try our best to maintain continuity with the carers, particularly with the smaller children, but we encourage the staff across our centres to get to know all the children, not just the ones in their immediate group, so that the children don't identify with just the one staff member and if one has to leave, then we can manage so that another familiar face is always there".

Not all children will have the same relationship with each carer anyway. All children relate to carers differently, just as you do in a school or work situation. A change of staff often means an opportunity for some children to bond more with them than the previous one.

"We definitely recognize that saying goodbye is an important factor for closure.
But the nature of the industry also sometimes makes it difficult to give adequate notice sometimes".

While the qualified staff might be on four weeks notice, the less qualified ones are often on only two weeks notice and casual staff aren't on any notice at all.

In order to address this situation SDN employs a pool of casual staff, so that they can make sure that they have "floating" carers who are used consistently, and therefore still provide a familiar face to the children.

Each child will also respond very differently to the departure of a carer. If the child isn't upset at all, it would most likely mean they didn't have a relationship with that person in the first place. Carers have a duty to not simply build the relationship between themselves and the children but to help develop the relationships between the children themselves to build a sense of team and security amongst their peers.

Children respond very well when there's a good sense of teamwork amongst the staff, an emphasis on providing a challenging stimulating environment for the staff and a focus by the employers or owners on development opportunities for their staff.

"Generally speaking if the child has a good situation at home and a good relationship with his or her parents, and if the carer's departure is managed well, it shouldn't provide any long term upset", says Udy.

"At the end of the day, when children go to school, the situation is much the same. Teachers also turn over quite frequently, senior teachers are often taken away from their classes for admin roles and children have supply teachers, but again if there's an effective system of teamwork is in place and if relationships amongst the children themselves are nurtured, this is much less of an issue".

While it's easy for us all to complain about fees, standards and issues such as staff turnover in child care, for the most part, child care centres are trying to manage the situation as best they can. But the onus falls on all of us as a wider community to help develop this industry and focus on its needs as much as we do with schools.

With the increase in the cost of living, more and more families will have both parents working at least part time and in need of child care, early childhood education providers such as preschools and child care centres will increasingly lay the foundations for our children's education and social development and if we want to invest in our future generations, we're going to have to start investing in child care.

More information on SDN Children's Services – www.sdn.org.au.

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Sophie Cross is a public relations consultant and writer who has publicised and written about everything from makeup to The Muppets, child care to celebrity chefs and perfume to Partners in Population and Development! Originally from the UK and as a languages graduate she has worked around the world, living in Australia for the last 11 years where she runs, PR Chicks.

She is sometimes devoted wife of Stu and always devoted mother to Francesca and two cats, with whom she's about to go on her latest adventure, living and working remotely from their little piece of Spanish heaven in Chite, the Lecrin Valley, just south of Granada. And FYI it's pronounced "ch-ee-tay" not shite.