Stay interviews and exit interviews for childcare staff

A stay interview is a short, private conversation with someone still on your payroll, held well before anyone is job hunting.

It is not a performance review, and it should not live in the same file: tell the teacher what it is — that you want to know what makes this job worth staying in, and what is wearing them down — and what you will do with what you hear.

Hold it with the people you most want to keep, not only the ones you are worried about losing.

The lead who anchors your infant room and the assistant who never misses a shift are the people you can least afford to lose, and they are the ones a stay conversation is built for.

Once or twice a year per person is a workable rhythm, plus after big changes — a new director, a restructure of the rooms, a schedule overhaul.

Ask, and then stop talking.

The set below works in any room:

1. "What part of your week here do you look forward to?" — the answer tells you what to protect when the schedule gets tight.
2. "What part of the week drains you?" — listen for the fixable: a break that disappears, a floater who never lands, a room that runs short by mid-morning.
3. "If you could hand off one task tomorrow, what would it be?" — worth weighing each answer against what it would cost to replace the person.
4. "How does the job compare with what you expected when you were hired?" — the gap between the posting and the reality is the thing to hear while you can still close it.
5. "Have you ever come close to leaving? What almost moved you?" — you are asking for the story, not for a confession that they browsed job listings; do not treat it as one.
6. "What would you like to be doing here a year from now?" — a new age group, a lead role, training they have been circling. This is where a growth conversation starts while there is still time to act on it.
7. "If you were running this center for a week, what would you change first?" — the operational answers in here are the ones that go straight onto your fix list.
8. "What do we do here that you would want us to keep doing no matter what?" — protects the strengths while you change everything else.
9. "What question do you wish I had asked?" — hands over whatever the set missed.

Write the answers down the same day.

Two rules keep the conversation worth having: do not negotiate in the room, and do not promise a fix you have not decided you can make.

A stay interview that ends in silence teaches your staff that answering honestly buys them nothing — and the next honest answer will be harder to get.

An exit interview happens during the notice period, before the last day, while the details are still fresh and the person is still reachable.

Say at the start what the conversation is for: to understand what happened so the next room keeps its teacher — not to talk anyone out of leaving.

The answers change once a leaver believes the room is not a negotiation.

Whoever conducts it should not be the person at the center of any friction, where you have a choice; on a very small team the choice may not exist, and a short written form is the fallback for the person who will not say it to your face.

Run it as a sequence: open with the reason, then work backward to when it started.

1. "What is the main reason you are leaving?" — then let the silence sit. The second answer carries more than the first.
2. "When did you first start thinking about leaving?" — dates the problem. An answer measured in weeks is one story; one measured in years is another.
3. "Was there a moment you decided?" — the specific incident is where the fixable problem hides.
4. "What could we have changed that would have kept you?" — the stay interview question, with the benefit of hindsight.
5. "How did the job compare with what the posting and the interview promised?" — this audits your hiring funnel, not just the job.
6. "Did you have what you needed to do the job well — training, materials, a person to ask?"
7. "How did breaks and coverage actually work when the schedule got tight?" — compare the answer to what the coverage plan says was supposed to happen.
8. "What should we keep doing for the next person in this role?" — an exit interview is not only complaints.
9. "Would you recommend working here to another teacher?" — the recruitment answer, and the one to watch over time.
10. "Is there anything we have misunderstood about your time here?" — the catch-all. Ask it last, and mean it.

When the reason is pay, resist debating the number in the room.

Note it, thank them for the straight answer, and take it away.

Before you respond to any pay answer, look at what the federal wage series — the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program — reports for your role, and decide what you can change and what you cannot before the conversation continues.

An on-the-spot counteroffer is a decision made under time pressure, and it can reset what the rest of your staff expects a resignation to be worth.

An interview that changes nothing is a conversation you will not get twice.

Treat the answers as data with a deadline: notes written the same day, themes read against every other interview that season, and a decision recorded for each theme — even when the decision is no.

Sort what you hear into three piles.

The first is operational and mostly yours to fix: breaks that only happen when coverage allows, schedules that move every week, supplies that run out, rooms that never see their floater.

The second is structural: pay, benefits, and whether a career here leads anywhere.

Those are budget decisions, and the answers belong in front of whoever owns the budget.

The third is what you cannot control: a family moving, a career change, a program across town whose hours fit someone's life better.

Losing someone to the third pile is not a failure; losing someone to the first pile after the same answer showed up in interview after interview is.

Close the loop out loud.

Tell the staff who answered what changed because of what they said — and what did not, and why.

The credibility of your next round of stay interviews is decided by what you did with this one.

Money aimed at staying can work: Treasury reported in 2021 that in a University of Virginia experiment offering child care teachers $1,500 to stay, departures were cut nearly in half, to 13 percent versus nearly a quarter of the teachers who received nothing leaving within eight months.

That experiment tested a payment, not an interview.

What the interviews add is the aim — they tell you where your own retention spending and fixes belong.

What you do with the structural pile — retention payments, schedules, career ladders, and the turnover tracking that tells you whether any of it worked — is the playbook on our staff retention guide.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. For wage or employment-law questions an interview raises, confirm with employment counsel or your state labor agency; for anything touching licensing rules, confirm with your state child care licensing agency.