Page 316 - Week 01 - Thursday, 17 February 2011
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centres are expressing concerns about recruiting and maintaining university-educated teachers when a qualified teacher can teach in a school, with higher pay and better conditions, and the government in the ACT does not appear to be addressing this issue.
Mr Doszpot quoted just a very small number of the comments that we have collected from the over 100 childcare centres that we have surveyed or are in the process of surveying. One of them said: “It is quite difficult to find good relief staff, which is a problem now and will be a larger problem once the changes are in place. We are going to have to cut places in our nursery, which will make things hard.”
We have asked over and over again: can the minister rule out that there will be a reduction in places in the ACT? And she cannot rule it out. She does not actually understand how this will be implemented in the ACT. But this is a minister who does not even understand much at all.
The ACT lacks skilled workers in the sector. Providers are finding it difficult now. And this is quite clear, with 71 exemptions granted last year. As Mr Doszpot said, that is up from the 50-odd last year. One director expressed fears at the extended time that she had been taking and the difficulty she had been experiencing in finding a qualified person for the preschool room. She had spent substantial sums of money on recruitment and so far had not been able to fill this place. This concern for the future represents a very large percentage of all the results that we have seen so far.
Fears have been expressed about older workers in the industry who have years of experience, some of them as relief workers, and I would like to point to the winding back already announced by the Hon Kate Ellis in December 2010, when she agreed that she would relax the qualification requirements for workers who had been in the industry for more than 15 years. This was in response to campaigning by childcare bodies and my federal colleague the shadow minister for childcare and early childhood learning, Sussan Ley, and this was a classic response to a typical policy-on-the-run approach by Labor governments at the state and federal levels.
What we saw was that no-one had actually played it through to the end to see what the implications would be for people who had been in the sector for a long time and who had not had much experience of further study and the risk that we had of driving people who were excellent childcare providers, with lots of experience, out of the industry because they did not have a piece of paper and did not have the inclination to go and get it.
The Australian Childcare Alliance undertook their own research and it showed that 74 per cent of parents surveyed would have difficulty in meeting additional costs associated with the quality framework. I have concerns that this in turn will force parents out of the workforce or, worse, force parents to seek less professional childcare elsewhere. Parents are already doing it tough and I expect this will only increase with the financial pressure brought about by these changes.
I support quality childcare but it must remain affordable and accessible to all families in the ACT. I fear that if these concerns are not addressed this will result in negative ramifications for the sector. The government needs to listen to the sector and the
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