Keeping Good Staff: The Preschool Problem Nobody Solves With Pay Alone

Staff turnover is the operational problem that damages a preschool most — and it damages the children most of all, because young children form attachments to specific adults.

Pay matters. But in settings that keep people, pay is rarely the main reason they stay, and in settings that lose people, it is often not the main reason they leave.

Why people leave

The reasons that come up repeatedly:

• Feeling unsupported with difficult behaviour — being left alone with a situation they were not trained for.
• No time to do the job properly — ratios stretched, planning and recording pushed into unpaid time.
• Not being listened to — decisions made about their room without asking them.
• Unpredictable scheduling that makes their own life hard to plan.
• No development — the same job with no progression.
• Conflict that nobody addresses — one difficult colleague can empty a room.
• Feeling blamed when something goes wrong, rather than supported.

Notice how many of these cost little to fix.

What to fix first

• Give people time to do the non-contact parts of the job within paid hours. Planning and record-keeping done at home is a slow resignation.
• Back your staff when a parent complains — investigate properly, but do not undermine them in front of a parent.
• Deal with conflict early. Unaddressed conflict is the fastest route to losing your best people, because they have the most options.
• Publish the rota further ahead and stick to it.
• Ask before deciding anything that affects a room.

Hiring for the right things

• Warmth towards children is the thing you cannot train. Almost everything else you can.
• Watch them with children before you decide. A paid trial session tells you more than any interview.
• Ask about a difficult situation they handled and listen for how they describe the child. The language people use about children under pressure is highly predictive.
• Ask what support they need — good candidates answer this honestly, and it tells you what to provide.
• Follow safer recruitment requirements fully — verify identity and qualifications, take up references properly, and complete the required background checks before someone works unsupervised with children. This is not paperwork; it is the foundation of everything else.
• Do not skip steps because you are short-staffed. This is exactly when settings make the decisions they regret.

The first month decides a lot

• Assign a named person for their questions.
• Do not put a new person alone with a difficult group in the first weeks.
• Explain the reasoning behind your practice, not just the rules.
• Check in weekly for the first month — problems surface early and are cheap to fix then.
• Make safeguarding procedures clear from day one — who the designated person is, how to raise a concern, and that raising one is always the right call.

Keeping people beyond the first year

• Offer development — training, a specialism, responsibility for an area of practice.
• Create progression even in a small setting: room lead, mentor for new staff, lead for a curriculum area.
• Ask their opinion on real decisions and act on some of it visibly.
• Recognise good work specifically — naming what someone did well is worth more than general praise.
• Protect breaks. A setting where nobody gets a proper break is a setting that will lose staff.
• Notice when someone is struggling and ask. This work is emotionally demanding and people rarely volunteer that they are burning out.

When someone resigns

• Ask why, genuinely — and expect the honest answer only if you have built trust.
• Ask what would have kept them.
• Handle the departure well — how you treat someone leaving is watched closely by everyone staying.
• Plan the transition for the children — a familiar adult leaving matters to them, and it should be handled deliberately rather than silently.
• Look for patterns across departures rather than treating each as an individual case.

The honest constraint

Some of this is limited by funding, and pretending otherwise is not useful. But within whatever budget you have:

• Time, respect and support cost less than replacement.
• Recruitment and induction have a real cost — in money, in disruption, and in the children's settling.
• A setting known as a good place to work receives better applications, which compounds over time.

One thing worth remembering

Children in early years do not attach to a setting. They attach to a person.

That makes staff retention not just an operational issue but a quality issue — arguably the quality issue that matters most.

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