Pissed off with work

I'm getting really sick of my job. I'm a nursery nurse. My job is to care for and educate small children. Recently, it seems that more and more of my day is spent doing other things. The amount of paperwork we're supposed to fill in is increasing by the day, and I don't think a lot of it is necessary. The latest thing is to work out a way for the children to assess their own strengths and weaknesses - these kids are three and four years old, for goodness' sake!

We plan the daily activities, which is fine, but then there's several different forms etc. to fill in, assessing how the activities went. If something worked well then we have to fill in a sheet describing what went well, and also a 'next steps' sheet, to say how we're going to follow up the activity, We also have to fill in a sheet for any children who need more of a similar activity to improve, and for those children who found it too easy. Then there'd be another sheet to say what we actually did to follow up. If a child expresses interest in something, there's even more of these forms.
As well as all this, we have a file for each child, where we keep dozens of observations on each child, plus carefully selected pieces of their artwork etc. for using when we make the profile that will be sent to the school which they are due to attend.
Oh, and unlike every other year, now we're not even allowed to write the profiles for our key group - only the teacher is deemed suitable to do this.

The boss has decided that we have too many staff in our room for the number of children (there's a minimum ratio) so if anyone is off ill or on holiday nobody is called in to cover them. The thing is, that 'too many staff' only applies when all of us are in the room at the same time. It takes no account of teabreaks, or doing the dishes, or getting all the extra paperwork done, or all the times that our room leader is called out to meetings, or 101 other things.

I'm getting so fucked off with the whole job now. It just doesn't seem worthwhile my being there if I can't actually do the job for which I was employed. I often don't feel like I'm doing the best for the children in my care.

On a slightly lighter note, there is the odd thing that makes me remember why I wanted to be a nursery nurse in the first place. for instance, today some of the kids were talking about what they want to be when they grow up. One of the younger ones said, very definitely, 'I want to be a sheep'...