Keeping Good Staff: Practical Retention Strategies for Early Years Settings in 2026

Every time a qualified practitioner leaves your setting, you lose not just a member of staff but a key relationship with the children and families they worked with. You face recruitment costs, temporary cover, reduced ratios, and the months it takes a new person to build the trust and routines that make a room work well.

Retention isn't just a people matter — it's an operational and financial one. Here's what the evidence says about keeping good staff, and what we hear from the settings that do it well.

Why practitioners leave (it's not usually pay)

When you ask practitioners why they left their last role, pay comes up — but it's rarely the whole story. The more common reasons:

• Admin overload: spending evenings and weekends on observations and documentation that should have been done during the day
• Feeling undervalued: not being consulted on decisions that affect their work, not having their professional judgement respected
• Limited progression: no clear path to a senior role, leadership, or continuous professional development
• Poor management: unclear expectations, inconsistent feedback, and a culture where problems get ignored rather than addressed
• Emotional exhaustion: the work is demanding, and without adequate support, it depletes people

Pay matters — particularly at the lower end of the pay scale, where the gap between early years wages and comparably skilled roles in other sectors is most stark. But settings with below-average pay and low turnover exist. What they share is that they've got the other things right.

What actually works for retention

1. Reduce unnecessary admin

If your practitioners are writing observations in the evening, compiling paper registers at the end of their shift, or chasing parental declarations on their personal phones, you are transferring your admin problem onto their personal time. This is corrosive to wellbeing and, eventually, to retention.

Investing in tools that make admin faster — digital check-in, in-the-moment observation capture on a mobile app, automated parent communication — pays for itself in reduced turnover even before you account for the quality and compliance improvements.

2. Give practitioners visibility and voice

Experienced practitioners have strong views about what works for children. Creating structured ways for them to raise ideas, provide feedback on systems and processes, and contribute to decisions about their room makes them more invested in the outcomes.

This doesn't have to be complicated. A monthly team meeting with a standing agenda item for "what's working, what isn't" is a start. What matters is that input is genuinely considered, not performatively collected.

3. Invest in continuous professional development

Access to CPD is one of the most consistently cited retention factors for qualified practitioners. This doesn't have to mean expensive external courses — peer learning, study groups, subscription to sector publications, and access to online training all count.

More importantly: making time for CPD matters. If CPD is offered in theory but never in practice because there's no cover available, it's not a real benefit.

4. Be transparent about progression pathways

If a Level 3 practitioner has no way of knowing how they might progress to senior practitioner, room leader, or management, they'll assume there's no pathway and start looking elsewhere. Explicit conversations about career development — even informal ones — make a difference.

5. Look after your room leaders specifically

Room leaders are the most important people in most early year settings, and often the most under-supported. They're managing a team while also being counted in ratio, often without management training, and frequently being paid only marginally more than the staff they lead.

Investing in room leaders — through training, through reduced ratio time for management tasks, through explicit recognition — has an outsized effect on retention across the setting.

The cost of getting it wrong

A single practitioner leaving and being replaced costs, conservatively, 30–50% of their annual salary when you add up: recruitment advertising, agency fees (if used), management time in interviewing, the cost of temporary cover, and the months of lower productivity while a new person finds their feet.

For a setting with 10 practitioners and a turnover rate of 30% — not unusual in the sector — that's three replacements per year at a significant combined cost. Even reducing turnover by 10 percentage points would pay for substantial investment in retention measures.

When to seek help

If your turnover is consistently above sector average, or if you've lost multiple experienced staff in a short period, it's worth doing a structured exit interview analysis to understand what's driving it. Sometimes the patterns are surprising — a problem in one room, a specific management issue, a policy that seems minor but rankles.

If you don't currently do exit interviews, start. The information is free and the insight can be significant.

We're also happy to talk through how the Early Tree platform can help reduce the admin burden on your team — one of the most practical things you can do for retention. Get in touch →