Hi, welcome
Your options, as you are aware are limited. Without university or other education standards you'll struggle for the rest of your working life going from job to job slotted into a certain level of salary. I did the same in security work and the only real benefit was the large financial trade off with shift work allowances. Even xmas day had triple time hourly rates. But even that nowadays could be eroded away less and less as private firms are contracted so they find all sorts of ways to cut costs to make more profit to suit the investors.
However eventually I started my own business in investigations and was a huge success. Relevance? Well if you have a real goal it could result in you enduring your current role for an end purpose. Your boss and the owner of the business is where the money is so you could consider all the requirements to start up your own child care company. The benefits are in tax, freedom, staff selection, hours worked and so on. Negatives- working really hard to save for that opportunity and that could be long term.
So, you'll have to find the answers to your problem but the key to anything like this is realistic positivity, the key word "realistic". Setting too high goals can result in your plans to collapse, too low and you wont achieve.
I hope it all works out for you.
TonyWK
