Pay disparity between early childhood and primary school teachers in NSW could create a chronic shortage of preschool teachers, an Illawarra preschool director has warned.Maria Whitcher, who has worked at the community-based Kiama Preschool for 25 years, said not being able to offer competitive salaries was making it hard for her to employ a higher quality of degree-qualified teachers."We've had three student teachers doing early childhood teacher training starting work with us in their first year and they have all switched over to study the primary teacher training," she said.
VOTE: Should preschool teachers be paid more?She said the pay gap was the main reason for the shift, and she was worried this would cause a chronic shortage of new early childhood teachers in future.The Independent Education Union (IEU), which represents preschool teachers, estimates a 20 per cent difference between the salaries of degree-qualified teachers working in community-based preschools and those working in public and independent primary schools or public preschools.In most other states, early childhood teachers are paid the same as their school counterparts. The union has urged the NSW Government to close the pay gap."Funding needs to come from the government to make that possible, not from the parents because I think the parents already pay enough in fees," Ms Whitcher said.The issue of pay parity became more pressing this year when the Federal Government introduced the National Quality Framework, a set of regulations that will standardise the early childhood sector in Australia.Between now and 2020, there will be changes to rules about teacher qualifications and educator-to-child ratios, including a requirement for preschools and day-care centres to employ more diploma-qualified staff."The government is pushing the National Quality Standard, which I think is a great thing," Ms Whitcher said. "It really is going to raise the bar and improve quality in services and make services consistent, but if you're not going to be able get qualified staff, that is going to make it very difficult to achieve."Last year, NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli commissioned a report into early childhood education funding, saying policy decisions by the previous Labor government had created a funding system that was inequitable and unnecessarily complex.IEU early childhood industrial officer Verena Heron said findings of this report were handed to the Government in December but the union was still waiting for them to be released.Ms Whitcher urged the NSW Government to release the report as soon as possible. "If there is action that needs to be taken, the sooner the better, and if that action is pay parity then the government of the day needs to do what they need to [in order] to make that happen as well," she said. A spokesman for Mr Piccoli said the review had made good progress and it was expected the report would be available later this year.
