It’s been my pleasure and privilege to serve the ECC in the latter months of this year, first as interim CEO, and now as Advisor. After a hiatus of 13 years, these have certainly been interesting times to come back into a policy role and reconnect with the ECC Board, national office team and our members. No sooner did I take on the temporary CEO role, than COVID-19 (in the form of the highly transmissible Delta variant) reared its ugly head, compounding the already huge issues facing ECE centres. This includes the underfunding of the Government’s pay parity promise, the cumbersome process of herding 600 employers into a MEPA for pay equity negotiations and a regulatory review that’s just starting to gather steam. Underlying all of this is the ongoing teacher shortage, a seemingly impossible nut to crack. It’s getting worse and makes the other issues much harder to manage for providers. To help us understand and negotiate this period, it might be useful to start at the very beginning. Where the teacher shortage started In thinking about when the shortage began, you need to go back several decades. In the 1990’s, the education and care sector began transitioning to a single ECE teaching qualification as the one qualification that would be acceptable in an ECE setting. The previous system allowed for a range of qualifications and experience – traditionally, staff in the education and care part of the ECE sector had come from many different previous careers in places like Plunket, Playcentre, Karitane Nursing and so on, as well as teaching roles. Qualifications and experience were combined to allow staff to accumulate a number of ‘points’ and those with sufficient points were able to fill the role we know as person responsible. Rather than being grand-parented into their positions, ‘points’ staff were given a certain period of time to upgrade their qualifications. However, many weren’t in a position to do so, meaning people previously qualified under the old system were lost to the sector, along with their experience. The regulated role of Person Responsible was further expanded in the 2000’s, with the introduction of the 50% required staff qualification regulation. This regulation dates back to the introduction regulatory review that resulted in the Education (Early Childhood Services) Regulations 2008 – which remain in force today, with only a few minor amendments since then. As the years went by, the ‘stick’ approach of regulation to increase the number of qualified teachers was augmented with the ‘carrot’ approach of creating funding incentives for centres with a higher percentage of qualified teachers working with children. The ‘funding bands’ as we know them were introduced in 2005, creating a financial incentive for centres to employ a higher percentage of qualified staff for the first time. Of course, those who were around at the time know that this well intentioned incentive only put further pressure on the scare resource of qualified teachers. It was around this time that the shortage of teachers gave us the ‘warm body policy’ phrase, or employing someone with a qualification and a pulse, regardless of anything else, simply in order to be able meet regulatory requirements and to maintain funding bands. The dire shortage was briefly alleviated when the decision was made to allow primary teachers into the pool that ECE centres could draw from for the higher funding rates. At that time, there was a surplus of primary trained teachers, so there was immediate relief. The sector went from over 500 advertisements in the NZ Gazette for ECE teachers to under 100, literally overnight. However this respite was only temporary, with demand soon exceeding supply again as primary teachers returned to primary teaching when openings became available, and the ever growing demand for more teachers went unmet once again. In January 2021, the primary teacher policy was further extended to the regulatory role of person responsible, but the pool of available primary teachers was already well and truly dry, and this extension provided limited relief. Further temporary bandaids have been applied through the increase in discretionary hours for funding purposes. And most recently, unvaccinated teachers leaving the workforce dealt our sector another hit on the supply side. The demand / supply imbalance The decision to move to a single teaching qualification was not a wrong one. But to do so without establishing how to increase the supply of ECE qualified teachers first was very wrong. At every step of the way, through regulation or funding incentives, government policy decisions have increased demand for ECE teachers, without addressing supply. All of this heaps pressure on the sector, with services least able to attract teachers Teacher supply shortage is the 90’s flashback no-one asked for By Sue Kurtovich December 2021 { 12 }
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