The Toronto Children’s Services: 2023 Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Funding Guidelines for Licensed Child Care are now available in the Documents section
The Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system supports quality, accessibility, affordability and inclusivity in licensed child care.
CWELCC is a five-year plan that is being implemented in stages, to make child care more accessible and affordable. Fees will reduce every year, reaching an average fee of $10/day by 2025-2026.
CWELCC will:
As the service system manager for Toronto, the City’s role in the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care system is to:
The application for the 2023 period is now closed. More opportunities to apply will be available in 2024. Please continue to check the website for updates.
The expansion period covers 2023 to 2025. There will be opportunities to apply throughout the next 2 years. The approach to expansion will be consistent with the Ministry of Education’s, Access and Inclusion Framework, and targeted. Priority will be given to operators applying to increase access to care in areas with historically lower availability of child care spaces and key socio-economic indicators namely, support child care for vulnerable or underserved populations, particularly low-income families; children with extra support needs; Indigenous families, Francophone families, Black families; other diverse families; and newcomer families.
For more information on the Toronto Children’s Services’ approach to improve access and inclusion for priority areas and target populations, please see the June 14, 2023 City of Toronto Council approved report, which includes a map of high-priority areas on page 9.
Further to the expansion criteria, the Ministry of Education has directed the City to maintain its current proportion of not-for-profit child care spaces. In Toronto, a minimum of 80% of the new spaces approved must be not-for-profit spaces. This will be monitored and actioned by Children’s Service throughout the expansion process.
New child care spaces must:
*See exception related to Start-Up Grants below
The Start-Up Grant is available to for-profit and not-for-profit Licensed Child Care Agencies and Home Child Care Agencies enrolled in CWELCC.
Applicants for Start-up Grants must commit to the following:
For additional information on the Start-Up Grant, including eligible expenses, please see pages 43 to 57 of the Ministry of Education Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Guidelines (June 2023)
TCS has developed a CWELCC 2023 Workforce (CWW) Funding Illustration Tool as an additional resource to assist licensed child care in understanding the CWELCC 2023 Workforce Funding calculation for their eligible RECEs. Agencies can reach out to their District Consultants to request a copy of the tool.