Shaping new policies and strategies in childcare: The application of systematic search and analysis of existing data sets

This paper draws upon recent research into recruitment, retention and rewards in the children's workforce in England. Substantial workforce restructuring is ongoing in this sector to parallel extensive policy development and public investment in expanded provision for children, young people and families. The team's job was to search, identify and analyse existing findings relating to 14 job categories constituting a small but significant element of the newly emerging 'children's workforce'. The paper identifies the substantial methodological challenges of the work as it progressed through its various stages and sets these challenges against the politics of policy recommendations. Some of these job categories are already relatively well paid and high status whereas others are poorly paid and low status. In this paper we focus most substantially on those which are low paid and low status as it here that the politics of policy recommendations are most strongly felt. Whilst much of our primary data were quantitatively constructed, we wanted the report to represent the broader contexts of the work and consequently developed Hypothetical Case Studies (HCSs) to depict the positive and negative aspects of particular job categories to stimulate debate and policy development. We will share some of these HCSs in the presentation.