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The nation’s childcare workforce is “underpaid and under-educated” and many teachers working in the primary school system would choose to specialise in early learning if they were paid the same, according to the former deputy chair of the country’s largest childcare provider.
United Workers’ Union members are planning to walk off the job in September to signal to the new government it needs to urgently boost funding so that qualified staff may be paid wages on par with school teachers, whose salaries are up to $30,000 more.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has committed to implementing another year of play-based learning within the public school system. He is pictured here with his daughter Harriet at Cheltenham Memorial Preschool.Credit:Nikki Short
Childcare workers or early childhood educators earn as little as $24 an hour, and the sector is plagued by a shortage of staff at all levels.
Wendy McCarthy, former deputy chair of Goodstart Early Learning and a former teacher, said she supported the pay push, but more needed to be done to boost the professional standing of the workforce.
“I support a great uplift in pay but I also support a great uplift in accelerated education,” McCarthy said. “Universities could easily design a course that recognises prior learning, which is what they did for women to enable them to go to universities in the ’70s who never finished school.”
McCarthy said the recent announcement from the NSW and Victorian governments about plans to add another optional but universally accessible year of play-based learning to the public school system would help instil confidence in early learning and greater respect for the work.
She agreed degree-qualified teachers should be paid the same in an early learning setting as a primary school, but said there should also be a push to get more childcare workers to move beyond the Certificate 3 and gain a diploma or degree.
Henry Rajendra, deputy president of the NSW Teachers Federation, said the union represented teachers employed at 100 public preschools across the state located on the same site as a K-6 or K-2 public school.
The federation did not represent teachers at community preschools and daycare centres, where pay could be much less, but that could change if they were brought into the public system under the government’s plans to add an extra year of school.