Revisiting the Challenge of Staff Recruitment and Retention in Children's Services

Abstract

This article revisits the challenge of addressing the staffing crisis in children's services. It argues for the need to respond proactively to the implications of women's expanding life and career expectations and options, and to the consequently diminishing ‘pool’ of prospective candidates from which early childhood education has recruited traditionally. More specifically, the article advocates repositioning the profession by constructing alternatives to the dominant images of gendered and apolitical caring it so frequently projects a thus broadening its appeal to a greater diversity of prospective candidates, including those with a strong interest in social activism. Ways in which the early childhood teacher education sector might contribute to this proposed repositioning are outlined.

‘I get frustrated because so many people have such interesting lives and do such interesting things. I don't want to be stuck looking after somebody else's children all day long’. Final year early childhood teacher education student.