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Strategies to build, manage, and retain a high-performing early childhood education team
Staffing is the heartbeat of every child care center. From hiring to onboarding, scheduling to retention, each step plays a pivotal role in delivering consistent, high-quality care to local families.
In this guide, we break down the essential components of effective staffing — and offer practical tools and resources to help you optimize your team’s performance. We'll walk through every critical phase of the staffing journey, including:
Whether you’re hiring your first assistant teacher or managing a large, multi-classroom center, these strategies are designed to help you build a team that stays strong — and grows with you.
One of the most exhausting parts of managing a child care center is the constant mental math: How many staff do I need? For what age groups? At what times of day? Based on how many enrolled children?
Staffing needs are never static. They shift with every new enrollment, every family withdrawal, and every staff transition. Managing these moving parts isn't just difficult — it's crucial. A strong, profitable child care center depends on proactive, ongoing evaluation of staffing compared to enrollment and classroom capacity.
To set yourself up for success, we recommend a consistent analysis and re-analysis of your workforce against your opportunity.
Key considerations include:
(How to Determine Your Staffing Needs provides a practical walkthrough of how to complete this analysis.)
Critically, if you have open classrooms but no teachers hired for them yet, it may be smart to hire proactively — utilizing new staff members as floaters or assistants while you work to fill enrollment. Strong staffing isn’t just about meeting today's needs; it’s the lever that opens up new revenue opportunities tomorrow.
We break down strategies for staffing flexibly to support growth in the 5-Step Guide to Hiring and Retaining 5-Star Staff
Finding great candidates means balancing broad exposure with child care-specific targeting.
Broad platforms like Indeed dominate the market for hourly and entry-level roles — many early childhood candidates start their job search there. (See Smart Sourcing Strategies for Child Care Staffing for a breakdown of the best platforms and strategies to use.)
But hiring for child care roles demands more than just a high applicant volume — it requires finding people with the right temperament, training, and passion for working with young children. To get more specific:
Your goal: widen the net, but tighten the filter.
Your job description is your first impression. Done right, it doesn't just explain the role — it sells the opportunity.
When writing postings, research from Indeed shows a few clear best practices:
We dive deeper into structure and examples in Crafting Effective Job Descriptions, including sample titles and phrasing that draw more (and better) applicants.
Finally, it's important to understand what today’s workforce values most. Flexibility, career growth, community impact, and quick access to pay are major drivers. (Explore these motivators further in What Motivates Today’s Child Care Workforce?.)
Once you’ve identified the right candidates and given offers, the next step is helping them get started — quickly, clearly, and in full compliance.
Unlike many other industries, child care onboarding comes with a complex web of rules and paperwork. Background checks, credentials, health screenings, orientation hours — it’s a lot for workers to navigate, and a lot for administrators to track.
And with the industry-wide challenge of offering competitive pay, centers often lose workers before they even start, simply because another job felt easier to step into.
To keep your pipeline moving, onboarding needs to be two things: efficient for you and engaging for the worker.
One of the fastest ways to lose a motivated candidate is to make onboarding confusing, slow, or costly. Child care workers often apply to multiple jobs at once, and if your process feels harder or more expensive than another center’s, they may simply move on. That’s why it’s critical to streamline your onboarding steps wherever possible.
The goal isn’t just faster paperwork — it’s creating a smoother, more accessible path from “job offer” to “first day.” Key ways to streamline your process:
Every additional appointment, drive time, or $100 cost you ask of a worker increases the risk they’ll leave for a job that feels easier to start. As we outline in What Motivates Today’s Child Care Workforce, today’s workers are looking for simplicity, flexibility, and clarity. If your onboarding feels complicated, they’ll choose an easier path — even if it pays the same.
When you automate what can be automated — and simplify what can be simplified — you not only stay compliant, you make joining your team a positive, easy experience. (Explore how technology can support compliance and staffing in Compliance Made Easy: Automating Onboarding and Ongoing Tracking)
Let’s be honest: onboarding in child care can feel like jumping through hoops. There are forms, training modules, fingerprint scans, and often a waiting period before they can officially begin working. That makes your role during this window crucial — you're not just checking boxes; you're keeping their excitement alive.
We recommend finding small but meaningful ways to stay connected while they’re getting cleared to start. For example:
These small touches turn a transactional experience into a relational one, reminding the worker why they were excited to join your center in the first place.
Need ideas for reducing post-interview drop-off? See Keeping Candidates Engaged After the Interview for more practical strategies.
Remember: at the same hourly rate, your new hire could choose an easier path. Your job is to make compliance feel easy and welcoming, without sacrificing standards.
Getting great people in the door is only part of the staffing equation. Keeping your center fully staffed, day in and day out, requires thoughtful scheduling that accounts for real-world unpredictability — from sick days to last-minute emergencies.
Without reliable scheduling, even the best hiring efforts will fall short. When teachers are stretched too thin or classrooms go uncovered, burnout rises, morale falls, and parents lose trust.
Your scheduling approach should be built for stability and flexibility, not just basic coverage.
The goal of scheduling isn't just meeting minimum ratios — it’s creating consistent, reliable coverage that gives your team room to breathe.
Strong schedules should:
Instead of treating coverage like a daily scramble, scheduling should be forecasted and layered — just like enrollment planning.
Learn more about aligning your staffing plan with enrollment goals in How to Determine Your Staffing Needs.
A stable schedule doesn't just protect compliance — it protects your teachers’ well-being, which directly impacts retention. Explore practical tips for mapping out weekly coverage in How to Build a Weekly Schedule That Keeps Your Center Fully Staffed.
No matter how strong your base schedule is, absences are inevitable. The key to long-term stability isn't avoiding call-offs — it’s planning for them without putting your program at risk.
We recommend:
Having a backup plan in place ensures that a sick call doesn't derail your day — or force administrators into classrooms, pulling them away from leadership responsibilities. Learn more about how to build a substitute-ready system in Planning for Absences: How to Stay Ready for the Unexpected.
Absence planning isn’t just about keeping classrooms covered — it’s also about protecting administrators from burnout. Directors who don’t have reliable backup options often find themselves covering classrooms, extending shifts, and carrying unsustainable stress. Building a dependable float and sub system gives leaders breathing room to stay focused on running the center, not scrambling to manage daily crises.
(Learn more about how staffing systems directly ease leadership stress in Easing Administrative Burnout: The Role of a Reliable Staffing Pool in Child Care.)
Need a technology-driven approach to match your center’s needs faster?
How Tandem Matches Substitutes to Your Center’s Needs walks through how centers book compliant child care workers on-demand to stay in ratio.
Hiring great teachers is only the beginning. The true test of a center’s strength is whether those great teachers stay — and grow with you over time.
Retention isn’t just about loyalty — it's about stability, culture, and long-term operational success. When teachers feel valued, supported, and seen as professionals, they stay longer, contribute more, and help build the vibrant, nurturing environment families are drawn to.
In this section, we’ll explore strategies to retain your team by investing in their growth, recognizing their contributions, and making them the heart of your center’s story.
One of the biggest reasons teachers leave isn’t because of pay — it’s because they feel stuck. Building clear career pathways gives your team a reason to stay, evolve, and continue investing in your program.
Even if you run a small center, offering professional development, mentorship roles, or leadership tracks shows teachers they have a future with you. We cover practical steps for setting up internal growth structures in How to Build Career Pathways for Child Care Workers.
Growth opportunities aren't just about titles — they're about giving educators a sense of momentum, progress, and purpose in their work.
Workers today aren’t just motivated by paychecks — they're motivated by recognition, respect, and meaningful connection to their work. (We dive deeper into workforce motivators in What Workers Wish Their Center Directors Knew)
Strong centers create cultures where:
Simple actions like:
Explore more about the importance of visibility in Celebrating Your Staff Publicly: Why Parents Should See It Too, and how to position your teachers as leaders — not just labor — in Let Teachers Be the Face of Your Center.
When teachers feel seen by leadership, appreciated by families, and empowered within your center, they’re far more likely to stay, grow, and thrive.
Retention isn’t just a cultural challenge — it’s an operational one, too. Centers that are chronically understaffed risk burning out their best teachers. But centers that overhire without maintaining strong enrollment risk financial instability — which can lead to sudden layoffs, staff dissatisfaction, and high turnover.
Finding the right balance between enrollment and staffing is critical. Leadership must continuously:
Keeping classrooms filled ensures staff have full schedules — and job security. Keeping ratios manageable ensures staff aren't constantly overwhelmed.
We break down how to build smart, flexible coverage plans in How to Build a Weekly Schedule That Keeps Your Center Fully Staffed, and why having buffer staff pays off in retention and morale.
When call-offs happen — and they will — your response can either erode trust or strengthen your team. Having systems in place to cover gaps protects your team from burnout. Explore our strategies in Planning for Absences: How to Stay Ready for the Unexpected.
And when you need extra help, Tandem can match you with vetted, credentialed substitutes on demand — without requiring you to overhire. (Learn more about how smart matching supports balance in How Tandem Matches Substitutes to Your Center’s Needs.)
It’s a fine line, but centers that manage it well create environments where staff feel confident they can grow — without burning out or facing instability.
When most center leaders think about growth, they think enrollment, marketing, or adding classrooms. But in reality, staffing is often the bottleneck — or the unlock. A strong, flexible staffing model doesn’t just help you survive the day-to-day. It positions your center to scale intentionally, protect your team from burnout, and seize opportunities when they arise.
In this section, we’ll explore how staffing enables sustainable growth, and how delegation and substitute use can drive both short-term relief and long-term expansion.
As your center grows, you can’t do it all — nor should you.
Many directors fall into the trap of holding onto too much: managing schedules, overseeing every classroom, onboarding new hires, stepping in for absent teachers. But trying to do everything leads to burnout and limits your ability to plan strategically. Growth becomes possible when you delegate intentionally.
That means:
We dive deeper into sustainable delegation in You Don’t Need to Do It All – How to Delegate with Confidence in Your Program.
Giving others room to lead not only supports growth — it increases team investment and retention along the way.
When your staffing model is rigid, enrollment growth feels risky. You can’t open a classroom unless you have a lead teacher. You can’t take on a new toddler unless you can cover the ratio. That kind of fragility forces centers to say no to growth. Flexible staffing changes that.
When you have:
…you can grow with more confidence and less stress.
For example:
(See Using Substitutes Strategically to Prevent Burnout for ideas on how to layer this into your model.)
Ultimately, staffing stability drives enrollment stability. Parents trust centers that have consistent faces, smooth transitions, and leadership that isn't constantly pulled away to solve coverage problems. (Explore this relationship in Turning Staffing Stability Into Increased Enrollment.)
Strong staffing isn’t just about filling classrooms — it’s about building the foundation for your center’s stability, growth, and impact for years to come.
By investing in strategic hiring, thoughtful onboarding, reliable scheduling, supportive retention practices, and flexible growth planning, you can create a team that not only meets today’s needs, but powers your future success.
Remember:
At Tandem, we’re proud to support child care centers through every stage of this journey.
Whether you're filling a last-minute absence, expanding your classrooms, or building leadership capacity, we're here to help you strengthen your team and your future.
Ready to start building a stronger, more resilient center? Let’s grow together.