The Datum Report

Occupation 3232 · Associate professional occupations

Early education and childcare practitioners

Half of full-time early education and childcare practitioners in the UK earn more than £23,717 a year, and half earn less.

Early education and childcare practitioners lead the learning and development of and care for children from birth up to five years of age in a school, nursery, or childcare environment.

How people enter it

Qualified practitioners need to have achieved an early years degree qualification, such as Early Years Professional, Early Years Teacher, Early Childhood Studies Degree, Early Childhood Graduate Practitioner Competencies. A DBS check is mandatory.

What the work involves

• plans children’s day and activities and leads on social, language and numerical development
• coordinates observation and assessment on children’s play, development and learning
• identifies and responds to health and safety issues
• leads on preparing children for transitions to different settings, including school.
• communicates with parents, colleagues and external professionals on children’s development and health and well-being
• supervises and supports other early education and childcare workers
• coordinates nurturing care in bathing, dressing, preparation of feeds, feeding babies, and in changing babies and toddlers clothing whenever necessary
• provides a secure and supportive environment and supervises young children at mealtimes
• promotes and leads physical activities and children’s games, play, creativity, and problem solving

Also called

Childcare practitioner · Early years practitioner · Pre-school practitioner

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for early education and childcare practitioners, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 10 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Higher level teaching assistants