Child care centres are in crisis, not just in Toronto, but across Ontario. To some degree, parents are aware of this. They’ve been through the months- and even years-long waits to get a spot in a licensed child care centre. They may have noticed the churn in staff. But the full scale of the crisis is obscured by a little-known reality—increasingly, the people working in early childhood educator (ECE) roles are not, in fact, ECEs.

According to data obtained through a freedom of information (FOI) request by the non-profit Building Blocks for Child Care (B2C2), in the last five years, the number of child care centres with non-ECEs working in ECE-designated roles grew by 1,156 percent. In 2020-2021, the Ministry approved 159 of these underqualified hires in Ontario; in 2024-2025, it granted 1,997.

Ontario legislation stipulates that one-third of those working in an infant and toddler room and two-thirds of those working in a preschool room must be registered with the College of Early Childhood Educators. All supervisory positions are also designated ECE positions, by law. The College requires members to have an early childhood education diploma or degree from a recognized program.

But Ontario’s legislation also allows child care centres to apply to the Ministry of Education to get what’s called a “Director Approval” to hire individuals who aren’t ECEs for ECE-designated positions. The people taking Director Approval positions must be at least 18 and not have a criminal record. The Ministry approves them to work in an ECE-designated position, despite their lack of qualifications, for a four-year period. After four years, the Minister can re-approve the same underqualified hire, but this requires documentation that the individual is pursuing an ECE program, or planning to do so in the future.

“Director Approvals used to be seen as a very temporary measure in emergencies. Now, it’s become a mainstream recruitment strategy,” explains Sue Colley, chair of B2C2. “There is a shortage of ECEs, and we think that’s very tied to the fact that they don’t earn enough money, and they hardly have any benefits, and they have very poor working conditions.”

Some of the workers filling Director Approval roles are enrolled in an ECE program or have early childhood assistant training—which isn’t recognized by the College and can vary greatly in the quality of the curriculum and time involved, from three months to one year. Others “don’t have to have any qualifications except for high school and a first aid certificate,” says Colley.

The rise in Director Approvals, and the proportionate drop in registered ECEs at child care centres, greatly affects the quality of care in the province, according to advocates.

ECEs have gone through at least a two-year program that details the ways that young children learn and develop at different ages, how to best help children regulate their emotions and grow their confidence, and much more. An ECE program includes theory, taught in the classroom, as well as the opportunity to put those theories into practice via a supervised placement.

“Director Approvals used to be seen as a very temporary measure in emergencies. Now, it’s become a mainstream recruitment strategy.”

Non-ECEs can be wonderful with children, contribute greatly to child care and learn on the job from their ECE colleagues. But child care advocates argue that centres need an adequate number of ECEs to ensure that children’s development is consistently supported in evidence-based and age-appropriate ways.

Describing the importance of ECE training, Amber Straker, a registered ECE and the Executive Director of the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario (AECEO), explains ECEs are trained to create and implement learning programs, administer medication, and not only recognize when a child needs some extra support, but work with various consultants and providers, as well as parents, to ensure children get those supports. “Even if we had all day, I couldn’t explain all the hats that we wear as ECEs,” she says.

Another challenge with Director Approvals is that people who take these roles aren’t regulated by the College of Early Childhood Educators, the body that creates and upholds professional standards for ECEs. The College doesn’t provide ongoing professional resources and support to non-ECEs, nor can they investigate complaints or hold non-ECEs accountable if they fall short of the profession’s standards.

From a public accountability perspective, the steep rise in Director Approvals—which, until the FOI release, most Ontarians would have no way of knowing about—allows the government to “paper over the crisis,” Straker argues.

While the ECE shortage has been an issue for decades, it’s especially stark with the push for $10-a-day child care, subsidized by federal and provincial governments. (The Ontario government recently extended the deadline to meet this goal until March 2027; the current average in Ontario is $19 a day). With child care fees now 50 percent lower than they were in 2020, the demand for spots has grown. But, as Straker sees it, rather than increase wages to recruit and retain ECEs (which means increasing funding to child care centres), the government is allowing ECE positions to be filled by underqualified staff. The Local reached out to the Ministry of Education for comment on this story, and did not receive a response.

What’s especially startling is that many Director Approvals are for supervisory roles. Supervisors manage staff, are a key contact for parents, and they ensure quality and compliance with the standards for licensed child care centres in Ontario. In 2020-2021, 39 newly hired supervisors in Ontario didn’t have an ECE degree. In 2024-25, there were 286, a 633 percent jump. Currently, 17 percent of all newly hired supervisors in the province don’t have an ECE degree. “These figures suggest a disturbing pattern: the sector’s leadership is increasingly being led by unqualified, unaccountable professionals,” the B2C2 report says.

In Toronto, in the most recent fiscal year (April 2024-March 2025), Toronto had 141 Director Approvals for underqualified staff across 99 centres. To put that in context, there were 1,424 total child care centres in the city in 2024-2025. This means that, in one year alone, 7 percent of Toronto’s child care centres hired one or more non-ECEs for an ECE role. Provincially, the picture is worse—16 percent of daycares in the province hired one or more non-ECEs in 2024-2025 alone.

The FOI data shows that for-profit centres are about 66 percent more likely than non-profit centres to hire ECEs for non-ECE roles. Director Approvals are also disproportionately higher in more remote and northern regions in Ontario, suggesting the ECE shortage, and subsequent effect on child care, is more pronounced in these regions.

In Toronto, most of the centres at the top of the list are Montessori schools. (There are also a few French language and Jewish schools.) Jacqueline Richman, the director of the Bannockburn school, which had five director-approved non-ECE positions in 2024-2025, explained that it has always been a challenge to find child care providers who are both ECEs and Montessori-certified (this can require a year or more of training in Montessori principles and methods). Since the push for $10-a-day daycare, “it’s become even more difficult,” she says.

Child care experts say the shortage of ECEs is less about a lack of ECE training spots, and more to do with retention. Too many ECEs are getting burnt out and leaving child care, or not even entering the field in the first place. “They are leaving because they have to pay rent, they have to buy groceries. They have their own children who they want to put in care and cannot afford to do so working as an ECE,” says Straker.

Data published in 2023 suggests that only around 40 percent of ECEs who graduate from college programs in Ontario are working at child care centres or in related ECE roles five years after graduating.

In Ontario, ECEs and director-approved positions are guaranteed an hourly wage of $24.86. This doesn’t increase with experience, though centres can opt to pay staff above this rate. The AECEO and the Ontario Coalition for Better Childcare are calling for a minimum wage starting at $30 for anyone with ECE training and $25 for anyone else working in child care.

There are precedents for higher wages. To encourage people to pursue ECE careers, PEI recently increased ECE wages at government centres. ECEs now make $29.15 in the first year, and $31.12 if they have five or more years of experience. Plus, B2C2 points out that many traditionally male-dominated fields that require two years of training or less make significantly more money, on average, than ECEs. (About 98% of ECEs in Ontario are women, and many are racialized.)

Of course, even $30 an hour doesn’t go very far in the GTA. Mehak Kapoor, an ECE in Brampton, currently makes $30 an hour, thanks in no small part to the recent unionization of her centre and, with it, collective bargaining capacity. But that means her take home pay is around $3,600 a month. Due to the cost of rent (she pays $1,900 to rent a one-bedroom apartment), groceries, her car payment, insurance, and other necessities, she lives paycheck to paycheck.

She loves her job. In her Hindu family, her mom would say that god can be found in the face of a child. “I get to work with little gods everyday,” Kapoor says. They can be a little sneaky, embodying the mischievousness of many Hindu deities. “They have that pure innocence.” She loves sharing parents’ excitement about a new feat a child accomplished. And “when they come to you for a surprise hug, that’s the best part,” she says.

Still, she struggles with the demands of the job. First, there’s the paperwork—required for all licensed centres. Each week, she has to work on her weekly learning and activity program plans. On a daily basis, she has to take attendance, check off that the outdoor playground has been assessed for safety, and log nap times, outdoor times, and cleanings. She has to record daily observations for each child. In many cases, child care workers spend more time around children than their parents, and these observations can be extremely important. Making up an example, she explains that if she were to observe that little Elias has been walking on his toes now for the better part of two months, she would then need to discuss this with Elias’s dad, and her supervisor. It could be nothing, or it could be a sign of autism.

Then there’s the actual care, the teaching, the cleaning, and the communication with parents—the daily photo snap and recap. At times, it’s simply impossible to meet the requirements of the job, and it feels unsafe, for both the kids and the providers. “Sometimes, a child may be throwing stuff, and we have to take them to a different room so that the child doesn’t hurt anyone,” Kapoor explains, pointing out that maneuvering an adrenaline-filled three-year-old can be very physical. But that means one provider is left with 16 preschoolers.

“They are leaving because they have to pay rent, they have to buy groceries. They have their own children who they want to put in care and cannot afford to do so working as an ECE.”

Tammy Kelly, a supervisor and registered ECE in east Toronto, says that in her experience, Director Approvals don’t always mean that people are working for years without proper credentials. She herself has hired people through the Director Approval pathway, she says—but in all cases, they were enrolled in an ECE program at the time and they had demonstrated, by working in her centre, that they were skilled at providing care.

Still, she says, she understands why it’s so hard to find qualified ECEs to fill positions. “A lot of people think we come in here every day and we play with the kids and we give them a happy day. My husband even thinks that. But at the end of the day, you’re a mom for eight kids. When these kids get hurt, it’s you, if they have a seizure, you’re responding,” she says. “You want to rip yourself in half to be able to maneuver around expectations, because you have all this paperwork that needs to be filled out, plus they want you present with the children as well.”

Both Kelly and Kapoor agree that a major increase in government subsidies for wages would go a long way to improve recruitment and retention. Giving ECEs funded time for programming and paperwork—something they don’t currently have—would also help. Funding child care so that caregiver-to-child ratios could be lowered to accommodate developmental and behavioural challenges would take some stress off of ECEs. For example, the government might provide funding so that ECE shifts can overlap by an hour, so that a child with autism can get an hour of one-on-one support. As Kelly sees it, lower overall ratios throughout the day would be far more helpful. In Kapoor’s view, a preschool ratio of one-to-five would be doable; the current funded ratio of eight children per child care worker means kids don’t get the attention they need.

Straker points out that better benefits and vacation are key. ECEs are only entitled to two weeks of vacation in Ontario (or three weeks after they’ve been working with the same employer for five years). They’re also entitled to just three sick days per year, despite the high risk of viral exposure. “The number of times that a child has sneezed directly into my eyeball…” Straker says.

Rather than improving the wages and working conditions of ECEs, the Band-Aid solution of simply upping Director Approvals speaks to the government “undermining the value of early childhood education,” says B2C2’s Colley.

“We often hear, ‘We’re raising the future leaders of tomorrow.’ That’s true, but right now, they are the children of today,” says Straker. “We need trained ECEs who understand the full holistic development of the child and can provide the high-quality level of care families are looking for.”