Excerpt
One of the main barriers to expansion of child care supply is a widespread shortage of qualified educators. This is mostly due to wages and benefits that are insufficiently high to attract and retain staff. As a result, there are long waiting lists to get into licensed child care (115,000 children with mothers whose main activity is paid work).
We do not have much good current data on our child care workforce, but Statistics Canada is attempting to begin to fill that hole. Towards the end of December last year, Leanne Findlay and Thomas Charters from Statistics Canada published a report on child care workers who care for children 0-5 years of age. The data is from 2021-22 and its source is the 2022 Canadian Survey on the Provision of Child Care Services (CSPCCS).
The authors restrict the sample to look only at centres who provide child care to children 0-5 years of age, and they address several issues:
- Centre employees – hours, training and roles
- Typical rates of pay
- Numbers hired, departed and staff vacancies
- How all of the above vary by auspice and organizational structure