Workforce strategy initiatives
Imagine a community where every child thrives, supported by dedicated early childhood professionals. At Peel Region, we’re committed to strengthening and sustaining our early years and child care workforce.
To achieve this, we’re working to:
- Retain child care workers by improving wages and working conditions.
- Enhance professional development through training and career growth opportunities.
- Increase qualified child care professionals with targeted recruitment efforts.
- Attract a diverse workforce that reflects the children and families we serve.
Welcome to the Workforce networking event
We hosted a Welcome to the Workforce networking event in June 2026. Recent ECE graduates had the chance to meet and network with early years and child care professionals and learn about growing an early years and child care career in Peel. Meeting recent graduates allowed providers to make authentic, in-person connections and potentially fill workforce gaps.
Licensed home child care career fair
At our licensed home child care career fair in 2025, attendees learned about opening a licensed home child care program in Peel region, and its many benefits, including:
- Working from home.
- Setting your own schedule.
- Financial resources and support.
Early years and child care job fairs
We’re working with community partners to host annual job fairs.
These job fairs provide an opportunity for employers and job seekers to:
- Discuss early years and child care job opportunities in Peel.
- Share important information and resources about the sector.
Peel Region directly funds eligible child care providers to pilot innovative strategies and support expenses such as paid planning and paid professional learning. This is to attract and retain eligible program staff working in licensed child care in Peel region.
The Ministry of Education (MEDU) created an Early Childhood Educator Promotional Fund to promote the need, value, and impact of early childhood educators (ECEs) in 2026, to:
- Raise awareness about the ECE profession.
- Encourage more people to join or return to the sector.
- Share information about employment, ECE education, and career path and professional development opportunities.
- Support the building of a more inclusive ECE workforce.
We’ve been working with EarlyON providers to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the EarlyON system.
This involves:
- Using community data for better program planning.
- Reaching out to families effectively.
- Enhancing DEI competency.
- Ensuring high-quality experiences in all EarlyON programs.
A final report outlines how our DEI journey began in EarlyON. This important work continues.
We partnered with research partners to study and understand the early years and child care workforce better. Data collected from these studies will identify ways to address recruitment, retention, and growth in the early childhood workforce in Peel. Access the following reports:
- Centre-base workforce summary report, for information about the Sheridan College research.
- Knowing our numbers, for information from Early Childhood Education - Research Policy Action (formerly known as Better Child Care Education)