reached out to their communities to draw them back in. I feel passionately about the idea that everybody should have access to quality early learning. Some children stand to benefit significantly more from attendance in quality ECE than others. But many of those children are at higher risk of missing out. Unfortunately, if you read our Swings & Roundabouts Winter issue, fees are being increased. A big driver of this is the government funding approach for Pay Parity. ECC has been doing a lot of work about Pay Parity and recently took a bold new step of convening an online hui to tell parents and caregivers about the issue. Town hall-style meetings with centre managers are also happening. For some families the ability to find early learning with very low or no fees could fast be becoming unobtainable. ECC analysis is showing that without a separate revenue stream, the government funding will no longer be sufficient to continue to viably operate many smaller and community-based early learning centres. This will lead to some centres closing. With the pressure on centres set to increase further in January 2023 with Extended Pay Parity. Pay Parity funding rates are more advantageous if the teaching team is less experienced. Teaching teams that are above average in terms of overall experience in that team will require higher salaries to be paid than the average-based government funding allowance provided to that centre. This is not sustainable. Something has got to give. Raising fees to fill the shortfall between Pay Parity funding and the increased costs will allow centres to continue to operate. But I ask you, who are the children who may miss out on quality early learning because of this, and is that a risk we should be willing to take? Funding conditions can be great at driving behaviours (they can be even more effective than compulsion through laws like the COVID protections were). So funding conditions that encourage centres to employ lesser experienced teachers are also worrying for further reasons I think. They are not the kind of policies that ECC will support. And if they are removed quickly they won’t do lasting damage. Our organisation values quality early learning – and the gains that have been made over the years are really precious. There is a sense in our sector that every significant improvement was really hardwon, and that in contrast it could be a lot easier to lose them. We also need to urgently address the salary/wages and conditions for ECE teachers. We hope the Teacher Pay Equity Claim will provide a solution to that problem and in the meantime many of us thought Pay Parity would help to progress towards it. Pay Parity and Pay Equity are not one and the same things. But the natural order would suggest that we will need to have centres to employ teachers, so we can’t afford to lose the centres due to Pay Parity before the dividends from Pay Equity can even be realised. Putting aside the obvious need to refine and make changes to Pay Parity, how Pay Parity and Pay Equity come together as policies is a matter the Government is still working on. Ngā mihi Simon At the beginning of August the ECC shared with families during an online hui why centres were feeling the pinch and how many were feeling handtied between delivering quality ECE and fair fees for their families. September 2022 { 9 }
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