The percentage of staff in Ontario child-care centres who are registered early childhood educators has been declining over the past few years, moving the province further away from one of its goals in the national $10-a-day system.
A recently published Ministry of Education report shows that while there has been a net increase in the total number of RECEs in Ontario child-care programs, there has been a larger increase in the number of non-ECE staff in daycares.
In 2022, when Ontario signed on to the national program aimed at lowering fees for parents and expanding availability of care, 58.9 per cent of full-time staff in child-care programs were RECEs — not far off the 60 per cent goal that Ontario agreed to in its deal with the federal government.
But now, that share has declined to 56 per cent.
Alana Powell, the executive director of the Association of Early Childhood …