Stewart Silk explains how new values and learning time cut staff turnover in a volatile industry
G8 Education, Australia's largest early childhood education and care provider listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), says staff retention across its national network has climbed above 80 per cent – up from an estimated 65 to 70 per cent four to five years ago – even as the company works through a major restructure of its centre portfolio.
Stewart Silk, chief people officer at G8 Education, told HRD the improvement follows a deliberate, multi-year push on organisational purpose, values and workforce investment, delivered against a backdrop of tightening compliance requirements and cost-of-living pressure on families using early learning services.
G8 Education operates over 350 centres across every Australian state, employing roughly 7,500 team members, after removing about 40 centres from its portfolio this year to focus on a smaller, more sustainable core network.
Silk said the shift followed a difficult period for the sector. "There's been a little bit in the media in the last 12 to 18 months around some of the challenges in the sector," he said, pointing to "the changing environment and cost of living, pressures of putting their children into care," which he said had also affected occupancy across the business.
Compliance sits at the centre of that operating environment. Centre managers, area managers and the operations team recently attended a professional development summit, Silk said, with quality, safety and compliance as the core focus given ongoing changes to the National Quality Framework and rising qualification requirements for educators. "Compliance has always been extremely important for us and it's a key focus," he said.
New values as a retention lever
Underpinning the turnaround, Silk said, was a rewrite of the organisation's purpose and values, launched in May 2025. "We shifted our purpose to a new one, which is to nurture the greatness in every child, to grow, thrive and learn," he said, adding that the company built five new values to define expected behaviour across the organisation. "The values have become a guiding North Star for everything we do in terms of rewarding and recognising the right behaviours and how we work and operate."
G8 Education has also moved from quarterly to biannual staff listening surveys, with every question linked back to the new values. "What we've been able to do now is we are measuring, I guess, our embedment of our values and actually living our value for our listening program as well," Silk said.
He linked the retention gains directly to trust with families. "There's a complete correlation between high retention and family satisfaction in our centres," he said, noting that consistency of familiar educators matters to parents leaving children in care each day.
Investing in the training pipeline
Silk said G8 Education supports roughly 1,000 team members a year through its own study pathways, guiding staff from Certificate III through Diploma and, in some cases, onto bachelor-level qualifications, alongside protected, monitored learning time for centre managers and early childhood teachers.
On workforce supply, he said the company also draws on government support where available. "There's also, in some cases, wage support to support the childcare sector in terms of sustaining higher wages or a better overall pay for team members," he said, adding that any funding G8 Education receives from government wage and training programs is passed on to staff.
He also pointed to opportunities in skilled migration and broader workforce policy reform to help plug longer-term shortages, while stressing that G8 Education deliberately recruits career-changers and school leavers without prior sector experience through traineeships – part of a broader approach some HR leaders are taking to tap workers who are already available rather than relying solely on external recruitment.
"It's a very purpose-led sector and people choose it because they want to work and help support the development of children to give them the best start in life," Silk said. "So it's quite an emotional and impactful sector to work in."
