Staff shortages can jeopardize educational quality by exacerbating work stress, which can lead to increased sick leave and prompt staff to leave the profession. Despite substantial variation between ECEC systems’ governance structures, welfare-traditions and personnel compositions, many countries face similar challenges. This presentation builds on the Job Demands-Resources Model (Bakker/Demerouti 2016) to explore how ECEC staff’s well-being is – on one hand – supported by various job resources (e.g. leadership, self-efficacy) and job rewards (e.g. salary, recognition), while – on the other hand – being undermined by job demands (e.g. staff shortages). In order to account for international variations, interrelationships are analysed in three countries with distinct welfare-state traditions (Esping-Anderson 1990): Germany (conservative), Finland (social-democratic) and Ireland (liberal). Despite their differences, all three face staff shortages and work stress in ECEC centres that harm staff well-being and national ECEC policy goals. The presentation utilises TALIS Starting Strong data from 2024 (OECD 2025), based on self-reports of ECEC staff and leaders, to examine mechanisms and interrelationships shaping staff well-being. After descriptive results on staff working conditions, well-being and stressors, correlation and regression analyses test interrelationships between these factors. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a model explaining ECEC staff well-being in the three selected systems. To avoid spurious correlation, other plausible influences on staff’s perspective are controlled during analyses. Preliminary results indicate key factors on well-being that are relevant regardless of system context: negative effects of staff shortages are contrasted by positive effects of supportive leadership or salary satisfaction.

Authors:
Samuel Bader, German Youth Institute, Germany

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Samuel Bader is a research associate at the International Centre Early Childhood Education and Care (ICEC) at the German Youth Institute.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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