Australia will need to hire 16,000 new early childhood educators to address shortages and meet increased demand after the federal government pledged billions in childcare subsidies.
Labor has announced a $4.7 billion policy to subsidise child care from July 2023, as part of its plan to improve women’s participation in the workforce.
However, John Cherry, advocacy manager at Goodstart Early Learning, said the country would need to employ an additional 9000 childcare workers and fill the sector’s pre-existing 7000 vacancies to meet the rise in enrolments.
Early childhood education centres are already struggling to keep up.
At Goodstart, between 80 and 100 centres have capped enrolments due to staff shortages.
“Parents are sitting on a waiting list, waiting for a spot to open up while the centre director is desperately scrambling trying to find staff so that she can take in those families,” Mr Cherry told a Senate committee.
Since 2020, the number of vacancies at Goodstart has doubled and attrition rates have increased from 14 to 24 per cent.
In the regions, Mr Cherry said up to 40 per cent of early childhood educators were leaving the sector.
Low pay, burnout and lack of professional recognition are the main forces driving the mass exodus.
“Lots of people are telling us they could earn more stacking shelves at Coles or Bunnings. And they absolutely can,” Mr Cherry said.
He has called on the government to fund an immediate 10 per cent pay rise for early childhood workers.
Mr Cherry said this increase wouldn’t be enough in the lon term, but would reduce attrition enough to stabilise the sector.
The wage expansion would have to be sponsored by the government because most childcare centres couldn’t put up pay without increasing fees, Mr Cherry said.
“We’d love to provide a pay rise to educators to match school rates, but to provide a 20 to 30 per cent pay rise would involve a fee increase of 20 per cent, which would simply make childcare unaffordable to our families,” he said.
Mr Cherry told the committee he had never seen the childcare industry in such dire straits and the flow-on economic consequences would be profound.
“Every vacancy we have can affect up to 15 other families,” he said.
“With the 7200 new vacancies we had last month multiplied by 15, the potential worst case scenario of how many families are affected by this is overwhelming.”
