Both the concept of well-being and the work of early childhood educators are complex. To date, research concerning educators’ well-being has lacked a comprehensive conceptualisation that reflects these complexities. With increased research, policy and practice attention, a clearly articulated conceptualisation is now needed to guide empirical research and practical efforts to better support educators’ well-being. In this article, the authors draw on multidisciplinary perspectives to propose such a conceptualisation. Philosophical, psychological, physiological, organisational science and sociological sources are explored and critiqued for their relevance to early childhood educators’ well-being. Key aspects of these sources, and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, are brought together to argue for a morally anchored conceptualisation which acknowledges that educators’ well-being is indivisible from the contexts in which it is experienced.

A child’s right to high quality education not only relies on a competent and skilled workforce, but one in which educators are well. Supporting a well workforce requires governments, organisations and educators to attend to work environment quality. This attention needs be based on sound, relevant evidence. In this paper we contribute evidence of educators’ well-being from the survey component of an Australian study with 73 participants. We map results against international guidelines, and policy openings in Australia’s National Quality Standard to understand how educators’ work environments are affecting their well-being. We conclude that existing policies on quality in early childhood education in Australia attend to only some features of work environments, with a notable absence of attention to supporting educators in the relational complexities of their work. To enable educators to provide high quality education and care, greater attention is needed by organisations and governments to what quality work environments might look like.

Early childhood workforce sustainability is an important issue, with implications for children, families and national productivity, as well as for educators themselves. Yet, in many national contexts, workforce challenges continue to undermine efforts to support sustainability. In this article, we evaluate efforts to address early childhood workforce challenges in the Australian context, where extensive early childhood reforms are underway. We argue that attempts to address workforce challenges in current policy initiatives are limited and may be insufficient for sustaining the early childhood workforce in the long term. Given the critical role that the early childhood workforce plays in Australia’s early childhood reform agenda, we then consider how workforce sustainability could be rethought and other possibilities generated for addressing entrenched workforce challenges. We conclude by arguing that greater attention to the everyday politics of educators’ practice, along with the forces shaping these milieux, may be a way of generating new possibilities for supporting workforce sustainability.