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CWELCC guide · autumn 2026
Enhanced Program Support pays for staff you cannot count in ratio.
Enhanced Program Support is the money that lets you put an extra educator into a classroom that needs one. Three things about it catch operators out: in Peel it is not a separate cheque, it can only be spent on wages and benefits, and the hours it pays for never attract GOF, WEG or WCF. Get that last one wrong on a payroll run and you have both an overclaim to give back and a wage promise you should not have made.
Where the money actually is
In Peel there is no EPS cheque. It is already inside your allocation.
Peel's 2026 centre-based guideline is explicit: EPS "continues to be included in your program cost allocation," and you have the flexibility to use it at any point in the year based on the needs in your program. There is no application and no approval step, which is what makes it different from One-time Emergency Funding — OTEF needs a complete application, a case-by-case approval and available budget before you can spend a dollar.
How it got into your allocation depends on when your centre opened. If the centre enrolled in CWELCC before December 31, 2024, your legacy costs — EPS, planning time and professional learning among them — were used to assess your legacy top-up and are built into the program cost allocation. If the centre or the spaces opened or enrolled after that date, the growth top-up sits on top of the benchmark allocation and is described as recognising those same typical costs.
That has a consequence worth saying plainly. The program cost allocation is defined as the maximum you can spend on eligible costs, net of base fee revenue. So EPS hours do not arrive as extra money — they compete with food, rent, wages and everything else inside one ceiling. Adding six hours a week of program support in September changes what is left for the rest of the year; it does not change the ceiling. How cost-based funding works sets out the components.
The short version
In Peel, EPS funds wages and benefits for staff above minimum ratio. Because they are above ratio they cannot be counted for ratio, and Peel lists EPS staff as an ineligible position for GOF, WEG, WCF and wage stability.
Pay at least Ontario's minimum wage and no more than your highest-earning non-supervisory RECE, enhancements included.
At year end you report EPS spending separately in the FAIR, plus cumulative support hours and the number of children served.
The two limits on the rate
A floor set by employment law and a ceiling set by your own payroll.
EPS funding may only be used for staff wages and benefits. Peel says so in the funding section and repeats it in the reporting section: wages and benefits for staff above minimum child care ratio requirements are the only eligible EPS expense. Equipment, supplies, a sensory room, a consultant's fee — none of those are EPS costs, though some may be eligible CWELCC costs in their own right under the attributable, appropriate and reasonable test.
Between the two limits you choose the rate:
- Floor. At least Ontario's current general minimum wage, which rose to $17.95 an hour on October 1, 2026 (it was $17.60 from October 1, 2025). If you set an EPS rate last winter and have not looked at it since, check it against the new floor.
- Ceiling. No more than the hourly wage of the highest-earning non-supervisory RECE employed at your centre, including wage enhancements. Peel's own worked example: if that RECE earns $27 an hour with enhancements, $27 is the most you can pay a program support staff member.
The ceiling moves, and that is easy to miss. Because it is measured on a wage that includes enhancements, the order of operations that sets your RECE wages also sets your EPS ceiling — so a WEG or WCF change, or simply the departure of your top-paid RECE, moves it. Our guide to the 2026 wage floors, WEG and workforce compensation works through the stacking. Check the ceiling when you set or change an EPS rate, not once a year.
The expensive mistake
EPS hours do not carry GOF, WEG or WCF.
Peel's list of ineligible positions for 2024 GOF maintenance, 2026 WEG, 2026 WCF and wage stability includes, in one bullet, "Enhanced Program Support (EPS) staff, Special Needs Resourcing resource teachers or consultants and supplemental staff." The reason is structural rather than arbitrary: program support staff cannot be included in the minimum ratio requirements under the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, and the wage enhancements attach to positions that support ratio. Peel spells out the link — "For this reason, program support staff are not eligible for wage enhancements, such as GOF, WEG, and WCF."
There is one exception in the same list, and it is the part that needs care: non-program staff who spend at least 25% of their time supporting ratio requirements. Peel's definition of EPS also contemplates "extend the hours of existing staff" as well as hiring new ones. So a real schedule can have one person in ratio for part of a week and above ratio for the rest of it — which is precisely the case the bullet and the exception do not settle between them.
What follows for the books is the same in every version of that fact pattern:
- Record the above-ratio hours as their own line, not as extra hours on a program staff member's existing line. You cannot separate them at year end from a ledger that has already merged them.
- Keep the timesheet detail that shows which hours were above ratio, because the hours number you will report has to agree with the dollars you spent.
- Where someone genuinely straddles the two, put the question to your Early Years Specialist in writing before the payroll run. A wage enhancement claimed for above-ratio hours is recoverable, and a rate promised to a staff member is hard to walk back.
Planning time and professional learning run on their own eligibility rules and their own reporting; do not fold EPS hours into either.
What the role is, and is not
It supports a classroom, not a child.
This is the single most common misunderstanding, and both the provincial and the Peel wording close it off. Peel: EPS "is a support for the entire classroom and program support staff cannot provide 1:1 support for an individual child or support specific children only." Program support staff and educators are expected to work together, sharing the responsibility of providing individual support to a child.
The province says the same thing as a principle of Special Needs Resourcing service delivery — inclusion means "a class-wide approach which does not separate or exclude children with individualized 1:1 treatment/actions." So a family asking for a dedicated worker, or a staffing plan built around one child, is not what this funding is for, however reasonable the request sounds.
EPS is also short-term by design. Peel's inclusive-practice requirements ask you to adjust EPS hours and staffing as the classroom dynamic changes and as goals are met, "including a plan to fade out support," and to work with your Resource Consultant — in Peel, through Peel Inclusion Resource Services — giving them full access to the program and carrying out the strategies they recommend. Budgeting EPS as a permanent fixture of a room's staffing misreads it.
Screening, first aid and training
One of the two qualifications is a funding condition, not a regulation.
Peel requires a program support staff member to have a current police record check including vulnerable sector screening, and a Standard First Aid certificate including infant and child CPR. It cites sections 59 and 58 of O. Reg. 137/15 for the two. Worth knowing exactly where each one actually bites, because they are not the same kind of requirement.
The vulnerable sector check applies regardless. The duty sits in s. 60: every licensee of a child care centre shall obtain a vulnerable sector check from every employee before the person begins their employment. An EPS hire is an employee, so it catches them like anyone else. Section 59 — the provision Peel cites — is the interpretation section that sets the conditions: the check counts only if it was conducted by a police service and prepared no earlier than six months before you obtained it. Section 61(1) lets a person start before the check is back if you require them to apply as soon as reasonably possible, the delay is justified, and you put additional measures in place to protect children in the meantime. Section 62 then requires a new check on or before every fifth anniversary and an offence declaration in each calendar year in between.
First aid is the one to look at twice. Section 58(2) requires valid certification in standard first aid including infant and child CPR, from a training agency recognised by the WSIB, for every supervisor of a centre and for every employee "who may be counted for the purposes of meeting the ratios required under section 8 or 8.1." A program support staff member cannot be counted for ratio — that is the whole point of the position — so the regulation's first-aid duty does not reach them on its own. It is Peel's funding condition that requires it. The practical answer does not change: get the certificate, because the money is conditional on it. Section 58(4) gives a centre up to three months for an uncertified hire where the person is required to obtain it as soon as reasonably possible, the delay is justified, and a certified person is near enough to respond to an emergency.
Peel also lists qualifications it recommends rather than requires: previous experience working or volunteering with children with cognitive, physical, social, emotional or communicative needs, and a diploma in early childhood education, child and youth work, developmental support, educational assistance, or recreation and leisure. And it requires training — all staff, supervisors and educators included, working in a classroom where program support is added must complete the Together We Are One training offered through Child Development Resource Connection Peel, with new hires viewing the webinar as part of orientation. Peel may ask you to verify that they have.
One date for the calendar while you are editing the orientation checklist anyway: on January 1, 2027 a new s. 58(1.1) comes into force requiring your written staff training policies to provide for training in respect of each policy and procedure the regulation obliges you to have.
Reporting
Three numbers, and they have to agree with each other.
In Peel, EPS is reported through the Financial Annual Information Return. You report:
- Total 2026 EPS expenditures, separately from your other expenses. Wages and benefits for staff above minimum ratio are the only eligible EPS expense, so this figure should contain nothing else.
- Cumulative hours of enhanced program support provided in classrooms with CWELCC-eligible children. Peel's instruction is that "the number of hours must align with the amount of funding spent on enhanced program support" — the two are checked against each other.
- Cumulative number of CWELCC-eligible children who need extra support served — children with cognitive, physical, social, emotional or communicative needs supported by program support staff, each child counted only once in the calendar year.
Peel reduced the number of key performance indicators for EPS, planning time and WEG for 2026, and for Peel sites says it will use your FAIR to complete the Ministry's Standardized Financial Report on your behalf. That makes the FAIR the single place these numbers come from, which is an argument for getting them out of the payroll system monthly rather than reconstructing them in March. A ledger that posts EPS wages into the same account as program staff wages cannot produce either the dollar figure or the hours. The reconciliation, step by step covers what else is compared.
If your centre is selected for a compliance engagement or a cost review, these are the records that get tested alongside the screening and training files. See compliance engagements and cost reviews.
School-age rooms
Before and after school programs are funded somewhere else.
EPS funding to support classrooms with school-aged children in licensed centre-based before and after school programs is funded separately, through School-age (6 to 12) Funding — not through your CWELCC allocation. That is consistent with the rest of the system: costs for delivering child care to ineligible children aged 6 to 12 are an ineligible CWELCC cost. If you run both, the same shared-cost discipline applies here as everywhere else, and a staffing expense is claimed once. Our guide to school-age funding alongside CWELCC sets out the split methodology and where the age line falls.
Why your neighbour's answer is different
Same provincial money, three local models.
Provincially this is Special Needs Resourcing. Under O. Reg. 138/15 a child with special needs is one whose cognitive, physical, social, emotional or communicative needs, or needs relating to overall development, are such that additional supports are required. Service managers must spend a minimum of 8.5% of their Local Priorities – Flexibility Funding allocation on SNR, and where they do not, the ministry recovers all remaining unspent funds. Direct SNR funding is available to licensees enrolled in CWELCC or exclusively serving children aged 6 to 12; others can be supported indirectly, through consultants.
What SNR may pay for is set provincially: a resource consultant or supplemental staff where necessary, including salary and benefits; professional development for staff working with children with special needs; and the purchase or lease of specialised or adaptive equipment, which may follow an individual child or be retained as a program resource. What it may not pay for is also listed — treatment services, case management of programs outside child care, supports to children and families in their homes, child care fees covering operating costs, and nursing supports.
Each service manager then builds its own delivery on top of that, and the three around Mississauga have built three different things.
| Service manager | Funded staff hours in your payroll? | What the operator deals with |
|---|---|---|
| Peel | Yes — EPS, inside the CWELCC program cost allocation | No application. Wages and benefits only, between minimum wage and your top non-supervisory RECE rate. A PIRS Resource Consultant. Dollars, hours and children served reported in the FAIR |
| Toronto | No published centre-level line | Every Child Belongs — resource consultation and individualised support planning, funded to ECB agencies under a service agreement with Children's Services |
| Halton | No named funding line | An obligation in the Agreement to accommodate up to the point of undue hardship, plus the Region's Resource Consultants under a three-tier model |
In Toronto the published documents all point the same way. The Every Child Belongs budget guidelines are addressed to ECB agencies holding a service agreement with Children's Services, and the contracted service targets are counted in resource-consultation FTEs and children served, at a base target of 32 children per consultation FTE. The City's own description of the service to families is consultation and individualised support planning. Nothing published for operators sets out funded staff hours inside a centre's payroll — so if you are budgeting extra hours into a Toronto room, ask Children's Services what is available before you commit to them.
Halton's model deserves a second look if you operate there, because the cost lands differently. "Undue hardship" is defined in the guideline, and the evidence it asks for is financial: significant direct financial costs assessed in relation to your operations after considering available funding sources and internal reallocations, or documented health or safety risks that cannot be addressed through reasonable modifications, or material operational constraints that cannot be resolved by adjusting staffing, scheduling, programme delivery or resource supports. Alongside that sits the Tiered Model the Region's Resource Consultants work to — Tier 1 class-wide universal design for learning, Tier 2 time-limited targeted support for an individual child and their educator, and Tier 3 intensive child-specific support with a Family Centre Plan. In other words, the accommodation is an obligation first and the budget question comes second — which is close to the opposite of how a Peel operator experiences EPS. An operator running centres in both regions cannot budget them the same way.
Questions we get asked
Is EPS extra money on top of our CWELCC allocation?
In Peel, no. EPS is included in your program cost allocation, which is defined as the maximum you can spend on eligible costs net of base fee revenue. For a centre enrolled before December 31, 2024 the legacy costs used to assess the legacy top-up included EPS; for a centre or spaces that opened or enrolled after that date the growth top-up is described as recognising EPS along with planning time and professional learning. Either way, adding support hours mid-year spends room inside an existing ceiling rather than raising it.
Our program support staff member is an RECE. Does she get WEG?
Not for her program support hours. Peel lists EPS staff among the positions to which the GOF maintenance, WEG, WCF and wage stability requirements do not apply, because program support staff cannot be counted toward the minimum ratios and the enhancements attach to ratio-supporting positions. Her RECE registration does not change that; the position does. Where the same person also works in ratio, the hours have to be separated on the timesheet and the treatment confirmed with your Early Years Specialist in writing before you run payroll.
What is the most we can pay?
No more than the hourly wage of the highest-earning non-supervisory RECE employed at your centre, including wage enhancements. Peel's example: if that RECE is at $27 an hour with enhancements, $27 is your maximum. The floor is Ontario's general minimum wage, $17.95 an hour from October 1, 2026. Because the ceiling is measured including enhancements, it moves when that RECE's wage moves — so check it when you set a rate.
Can EPS pay for equipment, a sensory room or a consultant?
Not as EPS. Peel restricts EPS to staff wages and benefits, and the FAIR instruction repeats that wages and benefits for staff above minimum ratio are the only eligible EPS expense. Specialised or adaptive equipment is something the province lists as a permitted use of Special Needs Resourcing funding at the service manager level, which is a different route — ask your Resource Consultant. Separately, an item may still be an eligible CWELCC cost in its own right if it is attributable, appropriate and reasonable; that is a different test and a different line.
A family has asked for a one-to-one worker. Can we fund that with EPS?
No. Peel is explicit that program support staff cannot provide 1:1 support for an individual child or support specific children only, and the province's SNR principles describe inclusion as a class-wide approach that does not separate or exclude children with individualised 1:1 treatment. Program support staff and educators share the work of supporting individual children within the classroom. If a child's needs are beyond what class-wide support can meet, that is a conversation with your Resource Consultant, not a staffing line you can fund yourself out of EPS.
We use a staffing agency when we are short. Can an agency invoice be an EPS cost?
Treat that as a question to ask before you book it, not after. Peel allows EPS only for staff wages and benefits, and separately lists individuals hired through a third party such as a temp agency among the positions the wage enhancement requirements do not apply to. An agency invoice is not a wage, and nothing in the guideline says it counts. Get the answer from Peel in writing before the cost goes in as EPS.
How long should EPS support stay in a room?
Peel's inclusive-practice requirements expect you to adjust EPS hours and staffing in response to changing dynamics and as goals are met, including a plan to fade out support. It is described throughout as short-term funding support. A room that has carried the same EPS hours for two years without a review is not what the guideline contemplates, and it is the kind of thing a reviewer notices alongside the hours and children-served figures in the FAIR.
Sources: Region of Peel, 2026 CWELCC funding guideline, centre-based (released December 11, 2025) — section 9 (EPS, the wage floor and ceiling, the no-1:1 rule, qualifications, the Together We Are One training and the inclusive-practice requirements), section 5.2 (ineligible positions), sections 2.3, 2.4, 3.1 and 10 (growth top-up, OTEF, funding components and cost eligibility), section 12.3 G (EPS reporting), the Highlights of changes, and Appendices 1 and 2 (definitions of Enhanced Program Support, Peel Inclusion Resource Services, Resource Consultant and program cost allocation, and the allocation methodology); Ontario Ministry of Education, Chapter 2 Division 2: CWELCC Cost-Based Funding Guideline (July 2026); Ontario Ministry of Education, Chapter 3 Division 1: Local Priorities Guideline (November 2025) — Part 7.4, Special Needs Resourcing: purpose and principles, the 8.5% minimum expenditure and recovery of unspent funds, eligibility, and the allowable and ineligible expenses; Ontario Ministry of Education, Chapter 1: Funding Guideline (July 2026) — Special Needs Resourcing as an expenditure category and the Local Priorities service targets; O. Reg. 137/15 under the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014 — s. 58 (staff training and first aid, and the s. 58(1.1) amendment in force January 1, 2027 under O. Reg. 197/26) and ss. 59 to 62 (police record checks and vulnerable sector checks); O. Reg. 138/15 — the definition of a child with special needs; Ontario minimum wage — $17.95 from October 1, 2026; Toronto Children's Services, 2026 Budget Guidelines for Every Child Belongs Agencies (October 2025) — the agency budget process and the contracted service targets; City of Toronto, services for children with extra support needs; Halton Region, CWELCC guidelines for child care operators (April 2026) — the Inclusion Requirements, the Tiered Model and the definitions of special needs and undue hardship. Programme names, funded amounts and reporting differ by service manager and change between funding years; confirm anything you are budgeting on with your own service manager. General information, not advice for your situation.
Setting an EPS rate, or unpicking one from last year?
Call 647-870-8498 or email info@ghayurtax.com. We keep the books for licensed centres and home child care agencies in Peel, Halton and Toronto, and we separate the above-ratio hours in payroll before the wage enhancement claims go in, not after the reconciliation comes back.