Some early childhood centres will now be able to pay less to relief teachers who filled in when other teachers were on leave. File photo. Photo: 123rf
Many early childhood teachers who work as casual or relief staff face a big pay cut today, with the government's decision to drop them from pay parity rules kicking in.
Centres that received extra government funding if they agreed to pay qualified teachers the same as kindergarten and school teachers, can now pay less to relief teachers who filled in when other teachers were on leave.
Relievers spoken to by RNZ said the change was disappointing and they were considering leaving teaching altogether - a move that would worsen the sector's staff shortage.
Teacher Amy Dean said she left a permanent early childhood teaching job 18 months ago because she was burnt out by the stress of the work.
She told RNZ relieving worked well for her and had reignited her love of teaching, but now one of the companies that organised her relief placements wanted to cut her rate by $8 an hour because of the rule change announced last month.
"It's quite a lot of money. It's about $280 a week less if I take the $8 pay cut, if I work about 30-hours roughly," she said.
Dean said with the cost-of-living crisis, she did not know how she could justify losing that much income each week.
Centre owners hoped the change would prompt relievers to return to permanent roles, but Dean said working conditions in some centres were not good enough.
She said she had started an online support group which had been joined by more than 140 teachers affected by the new rule and some were considering leaving early childhood teaching altogether.
"A lot of people are feeling disgruntled, feeling a bit unsure what's happening. A lot of people have been asked to drop pay. I was talking to a teacher who has been teaching 20 years and she's like 'I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm kind of at the end of my career but do I want to persevere with this," she said.
Natalie Dryden was another early childhood teacher who said she left permanent teaching to work as a reliever because of poor conditions.
"It was the teacher ratios, the workplace bullying, cutting your lunch break or not having a break at all during an eight-hour work day and I thought that was a bit ridiculous," she said.
Dryden said relief teaching let her look around and figure out which centres were the good ones to work at.
But now her agency wanted to cut her pay by nearly $5 an hour.
She said the drop in pay was unlikely to persuade teachers to seek permanent roles.
"It's ridiculous. It's not going to change much, you're not going to see a lot of relievers going into permanent jobs. They go into relieving for a reason and I think the government needs to look at why relief teachers have gone into relieving and why they have left," she said.
Dryden said she was currently working in a primary school and was thinking of switching permanently to school teaching or getting out of teaching altogether.
She said her pay included sick leave and holiday pay so it was not a better deal than a permanent job in terms of the money.
Education Ministry figures showed about 2600 early childhood services agreed to some degree of pay parity.
About 1300 had signed up to deliver full parity for all 11 steps on the teacher salary scale, nearly 1000 to "extended" parity which provided lower pay at the upper levels of the scale, and nearly 300 to "parity salary" which provided parity only for the first six steps of the salary scale.
Centres signed up to full parity received $1.50-$2.76 more per hour per child than a centre not providing pay parity.
They were obliged to pay qualified registered teachers $57,358 per year at the bottom of the scale and $96,820 at the top or 11th step of the scale.
Early Childhood Council chief executive Simon Laube said the main benefit of the policy would be to encourage more casual teachers to return to permanent jobs.
"It will stop that flow of permanent teachers thinking they can have the same role and get paid the same by being a reliever. So the pressure will start to shift. It will be more attractive to stay working for the ECE employers," he said.
He said the council was aware of quite a number of teacher agencies reducing their reliever rates in light of the pay parity rule change.
Laube said he did not expect the change would save services much money and it was likely reliever rates would increase if teacher supply worsened.
"We don't think it's going to affect the price that significantly over all," he said.
He said relief or casual teachers should never have been covered by pay parity agreements because centres did not receive extra government funding when they employed relief staff to cover for permanent staff who were on leave.
"By including them in pay parity it created this surge in reliever rates over the last three years, where they've just been going up and up and up and it's led to permanent teachers leaving their permanent roles to become relievers, so it actually started to worsen the teacher shortage," Laube said.
Reversing decades of progress - Kindergartens NZ
Kindergartens warned employers could exploit a change in early childhood teacher pay rules to increase their profits.
Kindergartens New Zealand, which represents six regional kindergarten associations, said the change reversed decades of progress and created a loophole.
"Employers now have a financial incentive to employ fixed-term relievers rather than permanent staff and to profit from the extra taxpayers' money available," its spokesperson Amanda Coulston said.
"This is the first step to unravelling pay parity which the sector has fought for more than 30 years. It's a slippery slope to further teacher shortages and short-changing our children."
She said the change was made at the request of employers and without consulting teachers.