Education and care and home-based services funding review

Overview

Pay Parity Funding Review – Consultation Extended

Following feedback from the sector, it has been decided to extend the deadline for submissions on the Pay Parity Funding Review by two weeks.

Submissions now close at the end of day on 6 June 2023.

The Pay Parity Team

Consultation on proposed changes

The Ministry of Education is undertaking a review of early learning funding relating to pay parity for certificated teachers. The Review’s aim is to identify and implement a preferred approach to better align funding for education and care services to their certificated teacher salary costs.

As part of the Review, the Ministry is now consulting on a proposal to help fully implement pay parity for certificated teachers in education and care services (including hospital-based services and casual education and care services) with their counterparts in kindergartens. The Review also covers pay for coordinators in home-based services.

Proposal for education and care services

For education and care services, it is proposed to replace the existing two main early learning subsidies for education and care services (the ECE Funding Subsidy and 20 Hours ECE subsidy) with two new subsidies.

A Teacher Salary Subsidy (TSS): a subsidy with the amount broadly based on an entitlement of full-time certificated teacher equivalents (FTTEs) allocated to each service and the average teacher pay in each service.
An Operating Subsidy (OS): a subsidy paid at fixed rates per child hour.

Proposal for home-based coordinators

For home-based coordinators, two options are proposed to improve their pay. The first option would separate out and redistribute some of the existing early learning subsidy funding for home-based services through a new Coordinator Salary Subsidy (CSS). The second option would uniformly increase existing subsidies to broadly reflect increased coordinator costs.

These two proposals retain core underlying principles and settings in the wider early learning funding system such as:

the cost of early learning being shared between the government and parents
funding being linked to regulated ratios and hourly child attendance, and
retention of existing weekly and daily funded hour limits.

Adoption of these proposals is a significant change to funding for these service types and so we are very interested to hear your view of the proposals or, alternatively, suggestions for redesigning funding to align with pay parity requirements.