A National Daycare Staffing Survey Is Coming

Sometime around October or November, an email will probably land in your inbox. It will ask about your staff, how hard it is to hire, why people leave, what training your educators need, etc.

It will look like one more survey in a busy week, but it isn’t. Here’s why we think it’s worth twenty minutes of your time.

What’s Actually Happening

The federal government is paying for a large-scale study of daycare staffing across Canada. The money comes through Employment and Social Development Canada. The work is being run by Colleges and Institutes Canada, the national body for colleges, together with the Canadian Child Care Federation and its French-language counterpart.

They’ve hired an outside research firm to do it. The job posting says the budget is up to $140,000, and the work runs from September 2026 to January 2027.

That’s the whole setup. A national study of daycare staffing, done fast, finishing in the new year.

Why This One Matters

Most surveys end in a report nobody reads. This one is different, because the project documents say the findings will be used to build four specific things:

1. A new national description of the ECE job. There’s already a document that lays out what an early childhood educator is supposed to know and be able to do. It isn’t law, but provinces and colleges look at it when they set their own rules and design their programs. It’s getting rewritten, and this study is feeding the rewrite.
2. New rules for giving people credit for experience they already have. If you’ve ever interviewed someone with fifteen years of hands-on experience and no Canadian diploma, and had no way to count any of it, that’s the gap this is meant to address.
3. Short training courses. The kind of professional development your staff will be offered and possibly expected to have.
4. Career guidance tools for people deciding whether to enter or stay in the field.

So, the survey isn’t asking about the rules. It’s the raw material the rules get built from.

The Hiring-From-Another-Province Problem

A big chunk of the study is about something very ordinary and very annoying: an educator certified in one province can’t just start working in another.

If you’ve ever found a great candidate in Ontario or B.C., and then watched them sit in paperwork limbo for weeks while your room ran short, that’s the exact thing the study is supposed to examine.

Although we want to be honest about the ceiling here: this study can’t change Alberta’s certification rules. Nobody running it has that power. All it can do is write down what the problem is and recommend fixes. Recommendations have to come from somewhere, and right now that somewhere is this survey that hasn’t gone out yet.

The Timing Is Tight

Here’s the schedule from the project documents:

Let’s work backwards from November 20. They have to design the survey, send it out, run interviews and group discussions, then read everything and write it up, all before that date. Realistically, the asking happens somewhere between mid-October and early November. Three or four weeks, maybe.

The documents list exactly who they want to hear from: educators, employers, supervisors and directors, associations, and colleges.

Why Your Answer Counts More Than You’d Think

When only a few people answer a survey, those few end up speaking for everyone. That’s not a flaw in this study specifically, it’s just how it works.

And the people who answer are usually the easiest ones to reach: members of associations, centres in big cities, operators already on somebody’s email list. Everyone else quietly disappears from the picture.

That matters for Alberta. What’s happened here over the past year — the 2025 funding changes, and the uncertainty about what happens when the federal childcare agreements come up in 2027 — is not what’s happening in every province. If Alberta directors stay quiet, Alberta’s situation gets blended into a national average that doesn’t look like anyone’s actual daycare.

One Thing to Know Going In

The project documents say all of the research becomes the property of Colleges and Institutes Canada, and the research firm can’t publish anything without written permission.

A final report will almost certainly be made public. The individual answers underneath it probably won’t be. So, whatever reaches the people making decisions is the summary somebody writes. That’s another reason volume matters: a summary can only reflect what it was given.

Three Things We’d Do Before October

Here are three tips to make it easier for you to get found and heard:

1. Make sure someone can actually reach you. If your centre isn’t connected to a provincial or national association, there’s no obvious path for that survey invitation to find you. CCCF has said it will reach out to its affiliates as the project gets going. Get on a list.
2. Look up your real numbers before anyone asks. You’ll probably be asked things like: how many staff left in the last year, how long it took to fill your last opening, how many positions are open right now. Most people guess. A guess made on a rough week sounds worse than reality; a guess made on a good week sounds better. Neither is useful. You can either do it yourself or get in touch with Childcare Insight and we’ll guide you though it.
3. Tell your educators to answer it too. The study wants front-line staff, students, and recent grads, not just employers. If the only people answering questions about why educators quit are the employers they quit on, you get a very particular version of the story.

None of this is guaranteed to change anything. National studies that do change things tend to be the ones where a particular group showed up in the numbers. So, there’s no way to show up except by answering when asked.