Early Years and Childcare Recruitment and Retention

The Early Years Learning and Childcare team can support you with all things related to recruitment and retention, such as financial incentive schemes, advertising jobs, safer recruitment, qualifications checks and more. Use the links on this page to navigate. If you can't find what you're looking for get in touch and and we'll be happy to help.

Financial Incentive Scheme

Information coming sooon...

Advertising Job Vacancies

You can use the following websites to advertise your vacancies:

Education Job Finder - Funded for Norfolk Ofsted registered PVI settings by Early Years Learning & Childcare
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
Norfolk Early Years and Childcare Jobs Facebook group

You may also wish to use local Facebook groups, school/setting newsletters, parish newsletters etc.

Safer Recruitment

We have created a Safer Recruitment Toolkit for early years and childcare settings, full of guidance and information to enable the development of robust and secure safer recruitment processes.

EYFS Qualifications Checker

For practitioners to be included in early years setting staff:child ratios, they must have a qualification the Department for Education (DfE) has classified as full and relevant. To check the qualifications of job applicants, please use the DfE EYFS Qualifications Checker. There is a spreadsheet for manual checking and also a digital tool which is a quicker way to check and receive an instant result.

Early Years Qualifications from Outside the UK

Applicants with an overseas early years qualification need an Early Years Statement to show how their international qualification matches against the criteria set by the Department for Education (DfE). Only those with a Statement, clearly setting out the Level at which their qualification has been recognised at, can be considered to count within the EYFS staff:child ratios.

The official oganisation for asessing applications for Early Years Statments is UK National Information Centre (UK ENIC, previously UK NARIC).

Career Progression

Our Early Years and Childcare Careers webpage gives advice and guidance on qualifications, career progression, training providers and lots more.