Who should work with young children?

The early childhood education and care workforce sits at the heart of Australia’s education system, yet it is often discussed in terms of poor practice, staff shortages, burnout and retention challenges. While the work demands high levels of pedagogical knowledge, emotional intelligence, stamina, and ethical judgement, it continues to be framed through the language of personal suitability, the idea that certain people are inherently right for the job.

Framed by this idea of inherent requirements as a marker of suitability, the ideal early childhood educator emerges as someone calm, relational, reliable, kind – a person whose temperament is as important as their capacity to teach. These inherent requirements may appear reasonable, and while they illuminate what we might expect from those who work with our youngest citizens, they also shape assumptions about who belongs in this work. 

So, who do we imagine is the kind of person who should work with young children?

The workforce we have and the stories we tell about it

The imagined educator, patient and kind meets a reality shaped by low pay, high expectations and entrenched professional stereotypes. Australia’s early learning workforce of around 268,000 educators is approximately 91% female (Department of Education, 2024) and carries one of the nation’s highest qualifications to pay disparities. 

Despite holding formal qualifications and engaging in complex pedagogical practice, early childhood educators are still largely represented through the language of disposition and virtue. The dominant image of the early learning workforce may not be one of professional judgement or expertise, but one of personal warmth, passion and a ‘love’ for the job, a framing that can obscure the intellectual and complex ethical dimensions of the work.

Australia’s early learning system runs on an economy of devotion, one fuelled by passion, love, and care. Governments, policymakers, and the public celebrate educators’ “passion,” a term that in this context often translates into tolerance for inequity. Passion, love for children, and devotion to the work are framed as virtues that dignify the profession while disguising the imbalance at its core. Together they operate as a quiet form of regulation, suggesting that emotional commitment should compensate for every policy and pay gap.

This sentimentality is visible not only in policy and media but also in everyday recruitment language. A quick desktop review of current advertisements for early childhood educators confirms that passion is a much sought after attribute. Yet when passion or love becomes a defining descriptor, it disguises the material realities of the work. The workforce crisis is then described as a shortage of the right kind of people rather than an absence of fair pay, sustainable workloads, and professional recognition. 

This logic keeps the sector low-status and politically quiet. It also deters those whose motivations are intellectual, justice oriented, or activist, people who might expand the field’s possibilities but might not fit its emotional script of ‘suitability’. This persistent search for the right kind of persons threads through many system levels from recruitment to policy language, where suitability becomes both a selection mechanism and a silencing device.

Who is suitable?

When emotional disposition becomes the dominant marker of professionalism, the risk is that we confuse personal traits with professional expertise. We recruit for patience, flexibility, and passion, rather than for capabilities such as critical reflection, pedagogical decision-making, or ethical reasoning. In doing so, the system narrows what counts as expertise and sidelines those who bring different forms of knowledge and understanding to the sector.

A recent poll conducted by United Workers Union (United Workers Union, 2024) found that more than 60% of early childhood educators plan to leave the profession within three years. People are not leaving the profession because they no longer care, but they might be leaving because caring has been positioned as an inexhaustible personal resource rather than a recognised professional responsibility.

Passion and love have become both a recruitment narrative and an exploitative mechanism, sentiments that keep the economic clock ticking. If early learning is to be taken seriously as education, not only care, then its workforce must be seen as knowledgeable professionals, not passionate exemplars.

Reimagining what counts as ‘inherent’.

What if we reimagined the inherent requirements of an early childhood educator to include curiosity about social and political structures, the ability to critique policy, and the confidence to advocate for collective recognition of professional status? Such a reframing would mean recognising that the work of looking after young children is also the work of shaping the social world children will inhabit. 

This shift moves the focus from personality to practice, from who educators are to what they do, and why it matters. It would not erase care or empathy; it places them alongside intellect, ethics, and agency. It makes room for educators to be both relational and political, both nurturing and critical.

So, who should work with young children?

We need educators who see their role not as filling emotional gaps in a broken system, but as shaping the intellectual, ethical, political and relational foundations of a strong education system. Those who understand this work matters, and who recognise early childhood education as both intellectual and relational work, know that it deserves strong structural investment, not applause.

The early learning sector survives on assumptions about who its workers are, and what they are willing to endure, rather than what their work is and what it entails.  This masks a deeper reality: the system depends on personal disposition to compensate for structural deficit. Reimagining these inherent requirements is not a minor adjustment; it demands a reckoning with the myths that have long sustained the sector.

In considering what is truly inherent to early childhood education, we might ask whether the traits we so often celebrate, warmth, patience, flexibility, sustain educators or keep them silent. Only then can we begin to build a workforce that reflects the true depth of its work; one that is as intellectually serious as it is relational, and as politically alert as it is caring.

References

Department of Education. (2024). 2024 National Early Childhood Education and Care Workforce Census. Australian Government. https://www.education.gov.au/early-childhood/about/data-and-reports/national-workforce-census/2024-national-early-childhood-education-and-care-workforce-census

United Workers Union. (2024, August 6). 60 % of educators plan to leave amid staff shortages [Media release]. https://unitedworkers.org.au/archive/60-of-educators-plan-to-leave-amid-staff-shortages/ 

Author: Karen has a background in teaching, academia, consultancy, and writing. Her work focuses on pedagogy and the design of environments that foster curiosity, dialogue, and deep engagement with practice. She has a particular interest in infant and toddler environments and the possibilities they offer for democratic participation.