NouLAB And Atlantic Colleges Get Over $4.3-Million For Skill Shortage Projects
FREDERICTON – Future Skills Centre, a federal government-funded research and collaboration hub aimed at helping Canadians prepare for employment and meeting employers’ emerging talent needs, is investing more than $4.3 million into two projects in Atlantic Canada.
Atlantic Colleges Atlantique’s (ACA) College Transformation des Collèges project is getting $3.45-million to look into skills gaps in priority sectors that colleges need to address. ACA represents the region’s seven public colleges, including Collège communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick, New Brunswick Community College, and Nova Scotia Community College.
NouLAB, the social and economic development lab at the University of New Brunswick’s Pond-Deshpande Centre, is getting $900,000 for its early childhood education (ECE) lab.
“These initiatives embody a key element of FSC’s strategic vision: effecting change at both the grassroots and systemic levels,” said Pedro Barata, Executive Director of FSC, in a release. “By focusing on challenges that exist at the level of a single profession and at a wider level in our educational systems, respectively, the projects are primed to deliver findings that we hope can be applied to other entities both within and beyond Atlantic Canada.”
NouLAB’s ECE lab will work with daycare operators that are having trouble recruiting and retaining qualified educators, and struggling to find time to train educators at the same time as running operations.
It aims to come up with prototypes of solutions and strategies that can be scaled in Atlantic Canada and beyond. They’ll do so by bringing governments, educators, industry associations, training institutions, childcare operators, and other stakeholders to share their perspectives on the problem.
“The lab process helps to try to understand what is the core of the problem, and why is it so hard to recruit and retain educators,” co-lead Amanda Hachey said.
“Our approach is to look at systems change, so how can we kind of make some change in the system?” she said, adding that one of the things that need to change is the narrative around the low value of women’s work.
The lab, which has five phases, began in July and will run through December 2021. The funding will support the project as a whole.
Hachey’s co-lead, Shawni Beaulieu, says they’re currently looking for four daycares across Atlantic Canada to be test sites.
“We’re going to take them through workshops, the innovative practices that we do, have the multi-sectoral teams at each test site, and we hope to be able to come up with potential solutions, process them in the centres and then share those learnings by the end of the project,” she said.
Hachey says the shortage of qualified early childhood educators is a long-running national issue. The strain on staffing is even higher with Covid-19 rules.
“We know from anecdotally speaking to operators that it was already an issue before Covid,” she said. “There’s no supply [educators], so if an educator is sick, that means the operators are probably coming off of her administrative duties to get on the floor.”
Hachey said a key problem is the lack of value placed on the importance of early childhood education, and the role of educators in that space. The sector is over 90 percent dominated by women, many of whom are parents themselves.
“Covid has put a bit of a spotlight on it, as it’s been recognized how much of an essential service it is,” she said. “It’s an essential service, yes, to get people in the economy and to get mothers working. But [it also provides] that foundational skills because the first five years of a child’s life are so influential and important.”
The lab will work with educators to amplify their stories, including their journey to get the qualification, what kind of training they need, why many leave the industry, and where they go from there.
It will also look at operators’ business models to find ways to provide alternatives for educators to upskill amid long days, and staff shortages. It hopes to “translate” existing knowledge about the issue to make it more accessible to the public.
Inda Intiar is a reporter for Huddle. Send her story suggestions: [email protected]