Excerpts from Executive summary
British Columbia is making a $136m investment in an Early Care and Learning Recruitment and Retention Strategy (ECL R&R Strategy) for the province’s Early Care and Learning sector. The ECL R&R Strategy is part of a larger ten-year plan (“Childcare BC”) to increase the quality, affordability and availability of child care spaces in British Columbia. The Strategy proposes to meet the following three overarching long-term goals:
- An adequate and stable workforce comprised of qualified and skilled early care and learning professionals
- Early care and learning as a viable, sustainable and valued career
- Appropriate compensation plans and human resource strategies.
The Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training (AEST) has engaged with the Early Childhood Educators of BC (ECEBC) to lead a Sector Labour Market Partnerships project with the goal to enable a mechanism for regular sector feedback on the overarching impacts of the ECL R&R Strategy on BC's child care workforce. ECEBC in turn has selected Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) as the subcontractor to produce and implement the sector-led impact assessment framework that will measure these direct and indirect effects of the implementation of the Strategy on the sector. A Sector Steering Committee (SSC) with representation for 22 ECL organizations provincewide has been established and meets several times each year for the purpose of guiding the evaluation.
The benchmarking report reviews activities and presents data collected by SRDC since the project outset in mid-December 2018 through to 31 December 2019. It includes a description of successes and challenges encountered during the evaluation work, a detailed narrative of the evaluation results and a set of recommendations regarding next steps and useful considerations going forward.