Changes announced by the Government around removing pay parity for some early childhood teachers represent an attack on all teachers’ right to pay parity and do not address the real reasons for the current crisis in early childhood education, says education union NZEI Te Riu Roa.
NZEI Te Riu Roa National Executive representative Virginia Oakly says removing pay parity for relievers will impact on the quality of teaching young children and babies receive, and it only highlights the Government isn’t listening to kaiako, parents, and whānau about what’s desperately needed to improve conditions in the sector.
“All teachers deserve to be paid fairly, regardless of whether they are permanent or relieving teachers,” she says.
“These changes in no way address the underlying reasons for the teacher shortage: poor teacher-child ratios, workloads that are too high for an already over-burdened workforce, and the ongoing difficulties to secure learning support for children who need it.
“All of this leads to poor teaching conditions for kaiako and impacts on the learning conditions of tamariki, resulting in people leaving teaching roles for relieving work or other work outside the sector.”
She says cutting pay parity doesn’t solve the reasons teachers turn to relieving work in the first place, nor will it solve the shortage of permanent, qualified teachers.
Relieving teacher and NZEI Te Riu Roa member Alex Owens says like teachers, relievers are also specialists, often with decades of experience behind them.
“Qualified relievers are essential, and they need to be recognised for the vital contribution they make to children’s education and the teaching teams they step into,” she says.
“Any employer or government that advocates for paying qualified relieving teachers less than teachers with permanent positions only devalues early education and represents a misunderstanding of the deep skill, knowledge, and qualifications that teaching professionals hold.
“The Government’s real intentions are becoming clearer by the day – to further degrade working and safety conditions for early childhood kaiako and tamariki in their care, completely ignoring all the evidence about what’s needed to create positive learning environments in the critically important first-1000 days of a child’s life journey, and instead putting business interests at the heart of their decision-making.”