Qualified early childhood relief teachers could be paid the minimum wage from next month after the Government announced the requirement for higher pay rates for centres who opt into pay parity will soon be gone.
The move has been hailed by some, while others express concern at what the impacts may be on a sector already struggling with staff shortages.
Early Childhood Council president and early childhood centre owner Michelle Bosch said: “It’s been a brilliant decision, a sensible one and great to see that the Government’s trying to help us and get rid of some of this silliness that we have to operate with.
“It’s not going to affect quality at all, it’s just going to mean that we can function much better.”
In the latest Ministry of Education funding period, 2605 teacher-led, centre-based services provided one of the tiered levels of pay parity rates for teachers, out of 2696 services in total.
Hourly rates ranged from $27.58 to $46.56 under the pay parity model.
In 2020, when the previous government announced the model, it was considered a big step forward for ECE teachers who had been highlighting the different in pay between qualified teachers in business-run centres and Government-funded kindergartens for decades.
Centres received higher funding rates for opting into the model, which provided staff with set minimum salary rates for qualification and experience levels and annual salary progression.
Unqualified staff, and soon non-permanent staff such as relievers, could be paid the minimum wage.
Associate Education Minister David Seymour stated in a press release that centres had constrained budgets and ability to hire permanent staff because of the cost of paying higher rates for relievers.
“This also means that some children do not have consistent teachers in place,” Seymour said.
“Simplifying the formula will allow centre operators to focus on delivering a consistent service for the children, instead of paperwork.”
The requirement to show a centre has attempted to find a qualified relief teachers before hiring an unqualified reliever would also be removed next month.
“It makes our lives a lot easier,” Bosch said.
“It was never about reducing quality because often what happens in my centre, for example, is we might have 11 staff, we only need seven of those to actually get our funding ratio. If one of those happen to go home sick or be away for the day, I’ve got four staff who know the children, are really good teachers but they’re unqualified. It just mean we might be able to use those now without having to write a whole bunch of paperwork that never got used.”
However, the Office of Early Childhood Education chief advisor Dr Sarah Alexander said she was “really worried about the potential consequences” of the two changes.
“We already have quite a bad teaching shortage… we only see that this will get worse.”
Alexander said she was concerned centres would reduce their permanent staffing and hire more relievers on casual contracts to save money.
“If we don’t have a stable, highly qualified workforce what type of quality are we giving to children who are often in centres for eight, 10 hours a day?”
Early Childhood Council president Michelle Bosch did not think this would occur.
“That completely goes against everything in terms of quality of care and education and I would be very, very surprised if centres would do that deliberately just to save costs,” she said.
Seymour, meanwhile, said in a statement centres couldn’t rely on relievers as permanent staff because guaranteed staff numbers were required to stay open, although Alexander said staff on casual contracts could qualify as part of staffing requirements for centres.
Seymour stated the changes wouldn’t increase the use of relievers but would make it easier for centres to increase their permanent workforce.
He said, in a press release, the changes wouldn’t compromise education quality.
Teachers in some areas struggled to gain permanent roles from centres because of the cost of their employment being at a higher step on the pay scale due to their experience and expertise, Alexander said.
“They go relieving in order to get some work. Now, if they can’t get work at the pay rate they are worth, they are just going to leave,” she said.
New Zealand Relief Teachers’ Association chairperson Sally Wallwork also expected the Government’s moves wouldreduce the reliever pool.
“They deserve the same pay and the same conditions and they will be shocked at this change because it will mean that they’ll have to pick and choose the centres that looked after them the best and pay them… have pay parity,” Wallwork said.
“There will be many relief teachers affected by this and that will mean that they earn less per week, or per fortnight and that will seriously affect their households.”
Wallwork says the reform was not to the benefit of early childhood education relievers.
“They’re not being looked after.”
