‘Have you seen the calibre of people working in daycare?’

There is a small campaign in Australia to defund daycare and give the money to mothers instead. One of the arguments is, “Have you seen the calibre of people working in daycare?”

Putting aside the rights and wrongs and practicalities of the argument, this should be a jarring comment for anyone making decisions about early childhood development. Especially the government. Because it’s becoming an increasingly huge issue.

As a society that is increasingly moving towards institutionalised care, either in the early years, or in later life, we need to understand what can make these institutions places that can offer a genuinely rich and rewarding experience to the ‘user’. However, often, the user is not the one paying for it. Rather, it is usually a child or someone who is suffering from dementia or who has SEND. Put simply, the user is usually vulnerable and voiceless. They can’t produce anything marketable, saleable or profitable. So society’s resources are not directed towards them.

As we have seen in the past week, when resources are directed in this way, the results can be outstanding. Princess Kate visited the municipality of Reggio Emilia, which allocates a significant share of its budget to its world-renowned early years centres. While settings around the world try to copy the ‘idea’, the reality is that this is a research-based pedagogy organised by serious PhD-level professionals. As it should be. It’s not just putting out a few ‘loose parts’ and letting the children get on with it. The Reggio Emilia is a long-term educational project. It is funded as such, and the staff levels are the stuff of fantasy for most of us. It is a project based on collaboration, strong leadership and high investment. It is never, ever, referred to as ‘childcare’, although, happily, it does enable parents to go to work. This is a genuine service FOR the children, not for the parents, although they benefit from it.

In the UK, the system increasingly drives high-calibre people away. This starts at school. Those who are seen as not very academic are given two career options: hair or care. Why? We KNOW that children do better when parents are educated, and this is true for those who work in early years settings. We need intelligence, education, and the ability to think and research. What we don’t need is basic supervision, unquestioning compliance and a lack of pedagogical curiosity.

The reality is that many experienced, intelligent, passionate people are leaving the sector — and fewer ambitious young people are choosing to enter it. Those who do can secure roles with wealthy families and earn money that most graduates can only dream of. And rightly so. This work is important and involves understanding child development, education and psychology. It is literally shaping brains.

Whether ECEC is provided by the state or privately, it cannot be run cheaply, and must not be run by lots of young staff on minimum wage who don’t really truly understand early childhood. The government is FORCING this situation onto children by underpaying so disastrously. It is calculating ratios to someone earning minimum wage, not someone who is a graduate with ten years of professional training and development.

However, another issue needs to be addressed.

Some settings genuinely are poor quality. Not because early years care is inherently flawed, but because parts of the sector have become excessively transactional and financially extractive. Some providers pay the absolute minimum they can get away with, operate with relentless staff turnover, keep staffing levels permanently stretched and reduce the experience to little more than supervision, containment and getting the ‘jobs’ done.
These problems have bled into the sector as a whole because it has become cultural. Children may be safe and fed, but that is not the same thing as receiving rich early education and care.
These settings damage the entire sector’s reputation. They reinforce the idea that childcare is low-skilled work, making it harder for excellent settings to argue for proper investment and professional recognition. Worse still, when governments see childcare primarily as a low-cost labour-market support system, policy becomes increasingly focused on delivering places as cheaply as possible, rather than on creating environments in which children and educators can truly thrive.
This creates a race to the bottom.
Good providers are then forced to compete against models built on low wages, minimal training, exhausted staff and high child volumes. The result is predictable: talented educators leave, standards become inconsistent, and governments respond with yet more compliance and monitoring systems that often burden the best settings while doing little to transform the weakest.
The solution is not simply “more childcare” or “cheaper childcare”. Nor is it endless bureaucracy. It is to recognise early childhood education as a genuine professional field deserving of serious intellectual, financial and cultural investment.
That means:

•  better funding linked to quality and staff qualifications
• graduate-led practice
• proper career progression
• stronger pedagogical training
• leadership development
• inspection systems focused on children’s lived experience, not paperwork
•  and a cultural shift away from viewing nurseries as warehouses enabling adult productivity.

If society wants intelligent, emotionally literate, thoughtful adults in the future, it must first value the people helping to build them in the earliest years of life. The focus should not be on ‘free’ for the parent, it should be on ‘experience’ for the child.