Workforce, Jobs, Employment and the Jobs & Skills Summit

ACA has been working tirelessly on addressing the nation-wide workforce shortages in our sector and developing immediate as well as long-term solutions to this urgent, ongoing problem. 

ACA recently participated in the Federal Department of Education's ECEC Workforce Roundtable discussions organised by Early Childhood Education and Youth Federal Minister the Hon Dr Anne Aly MP. This included participation at events held in Victoria and also Western Australia. Our contributions to these discussions will feed into the Australian Government's upcoming Jobs and Skills Summit (1-2 September 2022).

We have also finalised our 2022 Workforce Policy Proposal, which we aim to discuss in detail with Federal Minister Aly face-to-face in Canberra in the coming weeks.

ACA is urgently calling on the Labor Federal Government to address the workforce shortages via a set of short-term, medium and longer-term initiatives to increase attraction and retention rates, to ensure that we can maintain the delivery of high quality, affordable early childhood education across the nation.

Our short term recommendations include a one-off $3,000 ‘reward payment’ to existing early childhood educators and teachers, similar to the one-off Healthcare Worker Winter Retention and Surge Payment in Victoria, and a mechanism to support a national wage increase that will not impact on the costs to families.

Our long-term recommendations include reducing the cost of study for degree qualifications and creating a nationally available fast-track degree program to rapidly upskill early childhood educators to the degree qualification level of early childhood teacher in a period of 18 months, instead of the usual three years.

We're also recommending that the government rolls out an immediate national education campaign to promote the career path of working in the sector beyond the entry role and encourage unemployed Australians to consider working in the early learning sector through an entry-level Traineeship or to enrol in an Early Childhood Teaching Degree.

We will continue to work closely with Federal Minister Aly and the Federal Department of Education, Skills & Employment (DESE) to advocate for our sector's workforce needs.

At the same time we have been working closely with all ECEC peak bodies to develop a collaboratively supported range of solutions at all levels of the sector and government to address the workforce crisis. 

SOURCE: ACA NATIONAL COMMITTEE

PUBLISHED: 1 SEPTEMBER 2022