When you ask a childcare director about staffing, they look very angry. It’s not really panic. Not quite that. It’s more of the look of someone who has been living with a slow leak for years without a proper wrench to hand.
It’s not news that there aren’t enough qualified early childhood educators. It’s been slowly growing for more than ten years, caused by low wages, high turnover, and a path to credentials that most working adults can’t afford to take. What is getting people’s attention, though, is a possible way through. It looks a lot like a model that a community college in Illinois has been quietly working on and improving.
The Joliet model is based on structured apprenticeships and the idea of “earn while you learn.” It takes a lot from what workforce researchers and education institutions in places like Victoria, Australia have already tried out on a large scale. There, Chisholm Institute worked with government agencies to put people looking for work directly into early childhood services as trainees. These people made money while working toward their Certificate III qualification. At first, the program wanted to place 150 people. In the end, it got 520. The difference between what was expected and what happened isn’t a rounding mistake; it means that people have always wanted this kind of pathway and were just waiting for someone to build it right.
It wasn’t just the money that made that Australian program work, though that was important. It was the structure around the trainee—coaching to get ready for the job, mentoring, and monthly check-ins with both the boss and the worker. Early turnover in childcare is a real problem that has been studied and found to be a problem that needed to be managed instead of ignored. Employers who had never thought about hiring someone without all of their qualifications were brought into the program with the knowledge that they would get help. It turned out that this change in how employers thought was one of the hardest and most important things to do.
This is something that community colleges in the US, and Joliet Junior College in particular, can do, though the situation is different. In the past, the American system for early childhood apprenticeships has been weak, with most of it based in just a few states. It has also been hard to expand without careful planning. But more and more people in workforce development think that the community college model is best for this kind of program because it has ties to local employers, flexible schedules, and an open-access philosophy. It’s still not clear if the enthusiasm will lead to federal funding commitments, but the structural logic is hard to argue with.
Take a moment to think about who these programs are really helping. In Australia, the best places to find new employees were among long-term unemployed people, young people who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives, and communities with a lot of different cultural backgrounds. These candidates didn’t come up through the usual channels for hiring people to work in childcare. They needed a door to be opened for them, not a credential to be thrown at them. That’s what the apprenticeship format did; it let people join without having to pay for training before they could make a dime.
There are many things besides curriculum design that determine whether the Joliet model can reach the same number of people in the United States. It depends on whether employers in the area agree with the trainees, whether the state offers subsidies, and whether the licensing bodies are willing to see trainees as real workers. Progress has not been even. But programs that have been able to put those pieces together, even if only partially, have seen real workforce movement in districts and counties that were running on thin staffs before.
The lack of staff in child care didn’t happen overnight, and no single plan will solve the problem. But apprenticeship programs like the ones that community colleges like Joliet are making offer something that most policy proposals don’t: on the first day, a real person will be in a real classroom working with real kids. That’s not a little thing. In an industry where the vacancy rate is above 30% in some places, this could be the best place to start.
