Could a four-day work week transform early childhood education in Australia?

The national conversation about a four-day work week is gathering momentum, with trials across Australia and globally showing improvements in wellbeing, productivity, and workforce retention. While the model is being explored primarily in corporate and office-based industries, its implications for early childhood education and care (ECEC)could be profound.

For early learning services, where care must be delivered five days a week and often beyond standard hours, reducing the work week is not as simple as cutting a day. However, the concept still opens important questions:

• Could flexible rostering or compressed workweeks help address educator burnout?
• Would restructured funding models support services in trialling alternative work patterns without reducing care availability?
• Could this reform attract and retain educators in a sector plagued by high turnover?

ECEC is currently experiencing critical workforce shortages, with educators reporting heavy workloads, unpaid overtime, and high stress levels issues highlighted in recent studies such as the Early Learning Work Matters project.

The four-day work week has been shown in other industries to:

• Reduce burnout and improve staff wellbeing
• Increase retention rates by offering more work-life balance
• Boost job satisfaction

In early childhood settings, where the emotional and physical demands are high, adapting elements of the four-day model such as more structured time for planning, professional development, and recovery may strengthen educator wellbeing and the quality of educator-child interactions.

Unlike office environments, early learning services must remain open and staffed to meet families’ needs and ratio requirements. This means:

• Services would need to employ additional staff or redesign rosters to maintain ratios across the week.
• Funding models, already stretched, would need to cover increased staffing costs to ensure reforms do not compromise child safety or service quality.
• Any changes must align with the National Regulations, Law and National Quality Framework (NQF), ensuring children’s developmental and wellbeing outcomes remain central.

Families rely on consistent and affordable early learning. If a four-day model were implemented in ECEC without adequate funding, there is a risk that fees could rise or availability could shrink.

However, if designed correctly, a sector-wide shift could:

• Improve educator retention, ensuring continuity of care
• Support higher quality interactions between educators and children
• Align with broader workplace reforms, as more parents may themselves adopt flexible or reduced working hours

The UK’s free childcare expansion and Australia’s own ongoing affordability reforms show that funding and workforce conditions are pivotal to quality outcomes. If policymakers consider a four-day week in the future, ECEC must be part of the conversation, with tailored solutions that:

• Address staff shortages by improving conditions
• Ensure affordable and reliable access for families
• Maintain quality and compliance under the NQF

While a traditional four-day week may not directly translate to early childhood services, the principles behind it, reducing overwork, improving wellbeing, and creating sustainable careers are exactly what the ECEC workforce needs.

Any national move towards shorter work weeks should consider pilot programs specifically for early learning, testing flexible models that meet both educator and family needs.

Ultimately, rethinking work in early childhood education is not just about fairness for staff, it is about creating the conditions where children can thrive.

This article is based on reporting from SBS News.