Get Action! NZEI’s Petition for Early Childhood Education Pay Parity w/ Early Childhood Kaiako Hayley Cross: 1 May, 2024

The government recently made a series of changes to the licensing requirements for early childhood centres to be able to operate. 

These include repealing the network approval provisions for people looking to establish early learning centres and removing the Person Responsible Staff requirements to have a full teaching licence.

The government justified these reforms by saying regulation cuts would make it easier for early childhood centres to operate, thus addressing Aotearoa’s teacher shortage.

However, many Kaiako working in early childhood education have said deregulation does not address the root causes of the teacher shortage, and that more focus is needed on addressing pay inequality for teachers within the sector.

For this week’s Get Action! Oto spoke to Early childhood Kaiako and member of the New Zealand Educational Institute, Hayley Cross, to discuss a petition from the union to the government calling for pay parity in early childhood education.