Working in childcare in Ireland: a guide for educators moving here

Why Irish creches are recruiting abroad

Ireland has a documented staffing shortage in early learning and care. In the Pobal sector survey covering 2024 and 2025, around three quarters of services reported having had staff vacancies in the previous twelve months, and annual turnover ran at roughly a quarter of the workforce, as reported by Early Childhood Ireland. Services have closed rooms and held waiting lists open because they could not staff them.

The main reason is pay, which we cover plainly in our guide to what creche jobs in Ireland pay. It is a low paid sector and nobody should move here expecting otherwise. What it does mean, though, is that a qualified educator who wants to work in Ireland is in demand, and that recruitment from elsewhere in the EU is now normal rather than unusual. There is even a joint programme run by the Irish and Spanish public employment services through the EU's EURES network, which has moved well over a hundred Spanish early years staff into Irish settings since 2023.

Can you work here at all? Start with this

This is the first question, because for some people the answer closes the matter. If you are a citizen of the EU, the EEA, Switzerland or the UK, you can move to Ireland and start work with no permit and no visa. Nothing else in this section applies to you.

If you are from outside those areas, the honest answer is that this route is effectively closed. Childcare occupations appear on Ireland's ineligible categories of employment for employment permits, which means an Irish creche generally cannot sponsor you for one, however much it wants to hire you. The sector asked for this to change in the most recent review of the occupations lists and it did not. People from outside the EEA do work in Irish creches, but they are almost always people who already hold independent permission to work here for another reason, such as a spouse's status or a Stamp 4 permission.

Get your qualification recognised

Every person working directly with children in a Tusla registered service must hold at least a QQI Level 5 major award in Early Childhood Care and Education, or a qualification the Department has assessed as equivalent. Leading a room on the ECCE preschool programme requires Level 6 or equivalent.

A qualification you earned abroad does not count automatically, and this surprises people. There is no blanket EU mutual recognition for this occupation. The Department publishes a list of qualifications it already accepts, and if yours is on it you are finished. If it is not, you apply to have it assessed individually, sending your transcripts and evidence of your practice with children aged nought to six. The current process, the documents required and the address to send them to are on the Department's recognition page. We walk through it step by step in getting a childcare qualification from abroad recognised.

Garda vetting and police certificates

Everyone working with children in Ireland is Garda vetted. You cannot arrange this yourself in advance: your employer applies on your behalf through the Garda National Vetting Bureau once a role is on the table, and it is normal for a start date to wait on it.

What you can do in advance is the part that catches people out. If you have lived outside Ireland for six months or more, Garda vetting alone is not enough, and you will need a police clearance certificate from each country you lived in. In Spain that is the certificado de antecedentes penales. Request it before you travel, because doing it from Ireland is slower and more awkward.

What the job actually is

Irish early years settings are regulated and inspected by Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, and separately by the Department of Education where they deliver the ECCE preschool programme. Two national frameworks shape the work: Aistear, the early childhood curriculum framework, and Síolta, the quality framework. Settings are inspected and their reports are published, which is why this site can link to them.

Roles you will see advertised:

• Early years educator, working in a room with a group of children, the most common entry role.
• Room leader or lead educator, responsible for planning and for a room's team. ECCE rooms require Level 6.
• Deputy manager and manager, running the service, its compliance and its staffing.
• School age or afterschool practitioner, working with older children before and after the school day, often part time hours.

Watch the working year. Many roles follow the ECCE programme, which runs roughly thirty eight weeks from September to June rather than all year, so a good hourly rate can still mean a modest annual income. Ask explicitly how many weeks a contract covers and whether you are paid across the summer.

Accommodation: the part that decides whether this works

This is where honesty matters more than encouragement. Housing, not qualifications and not English, is the most common reason people who move to Ireland for care work go home again. When Irish employers ran large recruitment drives in Spain, reporting by The Journal found people who arrived with jobs but no housing living in hostels, sleeping in cars, losing rental deposits to scams, and in some cases giving up and returning home.

Practical rules that follow from that:

• Do not travel without accommodation confirmed for at least your first few weeks.
• Ask the employer directly what help they give. Some Irish creches now offer accommodation or help find it, precisely because they lost staff this way.
• Never pay a deposit for a property you or someone you trust has not seen. Advance fee rental scams target new arrivals specifically.
• Compare the rent against the actual hourly rate and weeks of work, not against the salary you imagine.
• Consider commuter towns and smaller cities rather than central Dublin, where the gap between pay and rent is worst.

If you are moving from elsewhere in the EU, look at the EU's Targeted Mobility Scheme through the EURES network. Depending on the arrangement it has funded interview travel, relocation costs and in some cases a first month of rent for people taking jobs in another member state. Ask about it before you pay for anything yourself.

Finding a job

Irish creches advertise in more places than you would expect, and many of the best roles never reach a big job board because the setting simply puts a notice on its own website or its Facebook page.

• Our childcare jobs board, which lists vacancies we find at Irish creches and preschools, free to apply to and free for settings to post.
• The large general job boards, and Early Childhood Ireland's own jobs board.
• Contacting settings directly. Pick a county, work through the creches listed here, and email the ones you would want to work in. In a sector with this many vacancies, a direct approach from a qualified educator gets read.
• EURES recruitment events, which are run by the public employment services and are free to attend.

A realistic order to do things in

1. Check that you are entitled to work in Ireland.
2. Check the Department's recognised qualifications list, and if yours is not on it, apply for recognition and expect several weeks.
3. Request your police certificate from every country you have lived in for six months or more.
4. Get your documents translated where needed.
5. Apply for jobs, and be direct in interviews about your recognition status and your start date.
6. Sort accommodation before you book travel, and ask your employer for help with it.
7. Arrive, complete Garda vetting through your employer, and get a PPS number so you can be paid correctly.