Thank you. Good morning.
As the registrar and CEO of the Ontario College of Early Childhood Educators, I'm honoured to join today's panel and to provide our insights on the proposed legislation.
Our college is responsible for regulating the profession of early childhood education in Ontario, with a mandate to establish registration requirements, ethical standards, requirements for continuous professional learning, and a complaints process to ensure that the interests of children and families are prioritized and protected. Our work also includes maintaining a comprehensive public register of our members. This scope of regulatory activity is unique, and it does not currently occur in any other jurisdiction in Canada.
In recent years, we've helped raise the profession's standards by implementing a mandatory sexual abuse prevention program for educators, by providing guidance on the inclusion of children with disabilities, and by recognizing that acts of racism and discrimination by educators constitute professional misconduct.
Our membership data report shows over 60,000 early childhood educators currently in Ontario, with nearly an additional 30,000 registered at one time during the past 15 years, but who have now left the profession. This kind of data is valuable when considering workforce challenges, and isn't collected by any other organization.
While we acknowledge the importance of all the principles in Bill C-35, we wish to emphasize that measures intended to support the affordability and expansion of child care spaces should not compromise the quality of early learning in child care. We believe it's vital to safeguard against policy solutions that may focus on increasing access in the short term but exacerbate longer-term systemic problems that impact quality.
While there's no universally accepted definition of quality, what research has demonstrated is that qualified and well-supported educators are the most significant contributors to early years programs, resulting in better outcomes for children and families.
We're concerned that the proposed legislation does not sufficiently reflect the importance of ensuring a qualified and well-supported workforce. The concept of professional educators includes not just minimum standards of qualification but also an ongoing obligation to practice in accordance with standards, to put the interests of children and families first, and to continue development opportunities throughout a professional's career.
Our first request is for the inclusion in the legislation of a fifth guiding principle that clearly articulates the need for a workforce composed of qualified, professional, well-supported educators. This would help to ensure that funding and policy initiatives focus on supporting and developing the workforce.
Ontario, like many other provinces, is facing a workforce crisis in child care. While high numbers of educators enter the field each year, people leave at nearly the same rate. To address this, it's necessary to focus first on retention by addressing systemic issues—including working conditions, program resourcing, compensation and lack of opportunities for professional growth, which are contributing to attrition—rather than overemphasizing mechanisms to increase recruitment of new educators.
Our second request is for the opportunity to participate in the work of the national advisory council. As a unique organization with data-informed insights about the profession, the college's inclusion on the advisory council would help to maintain standards for professional educators, ensure that data inform decisions, prioritize the public interest and help maintain quality in the Canada-wide early learning and child care program as it's implemented across jurisdictions.
Thank you for the opportunity to join you today to provide our perspective. We look forward to collaborating on this critical work, and I'm happy to answer any questions from the committee.