Recruiting and keeping staff now a problem
CASTLEBRIDGE-BASED Alison Hallahan has worked in childcare for eight years after many years of voluntary work with young people in clubs locally and was conferred with a degree in Early Years Education and Care from Carlow IT in 2017.
‘I’ve always been interested in working with children. I decided to do the degree because I wanted to improve my knowledge of child psychology and learn more about childhood development and the latest in best practice,’ she said.
‘I wanted to learn more about how children of that age could be encouraged to be more independent and encouraged to develop through play.’
Alison works in a community pre-school in Castlebridge for children aged between two and a half to four and a half years.
She said she was fortunate in that her hourly rate was increased to €11 an hour after she had worked there for a few years and was increased to €12 an hour when she obtained her degree.
But a large number of childcare workers are earning the basic minimum wage of €10.10 which was increased by 10c from January next in the last Budget; many are on permanent part-time contracts of 19.5 hours; they have to sign on for social welfare during the summer months and there is no sick pay scheme.
‘When we had a meeting with local TDs, someone made the point that if you worked in a well-known supermarket, you would get €13.50 an hour.’
Alison said everyone was very angry that a plea to politicians before the last election for improvements in pay and conditions in the childcare sector, had no effect whatsoever and nothing was put in place in the Budget.
‘30,000 of us demonstrated in Dublin last March and we got nothing.’
‘ They could have done so much just introducing better pay into the situation. Any manager will tell you how hard it is to recruit. Employees are having to sign on for the summer and they’re not coming back into the sector.
‘ The Government keeps saying that they are putting thousands and thousands into childcare but it’s going towards maintaining the schemes that they have in place. Apart from the wages of employees, you have to remember that there are overheads as well. Insurance almost doubled last year.’
‘I think they need to do a separate costing and introduce a pay scale for the staff, that takes both experience and qualifications into account- that would encourage people who have left to come back into the sector and encourage new people to join.’
Alison forsees it becoming more difficult to find staff if the issue is not addressed and said you only have to look at all the repeat job advertisements to realise there is a problem.
‘Parents are the first educators of their children and pre-schools are the second. People think you go in and run around and just play with the children but there is a lot more involved. We’re preparing children for school. There is also a lot of paperwork involved nowadays – we are inspected by four different bodies every year.’