MP’s vision for early education
The Government has outlined its ambition to reduce teacher-tochild ratios and address pay disparities in the early childhood sector.
Education Minister Chris Hipkins launched the draft strategic plan for early learning yesterday at Knox Church Playgroup in Lower Hutt. It set out the vision for early education over the next 10 years.
He said early childhood education was an important factor in setting up children for later in life.
‘‘It’s about making sure that out of the huge growth in early childhood education that we’ve seen in recent years, that we’re actually making sure that the quality is keeping up. We know that kids who participate in early childhood education, particularly around the ages of 3 and 4, actually do better when they get on to school.’’
Hipkins said the plan would cost $3.5 billion over 10 years if everything in the draft was executed. What would be included in the final plan had yet to be determined. It broadly involved improving participation and quality of education.
The Government wanted to ensure they had a well-trained and qualified workforce with a funding system to allow for that. ‘‘The first priority is reinstating the funding rate for services that have 100 per cent qualified teachers already so that they can actually keep up with costs.’’
Hipkins said they would also need to look at pay parity for teachers across the early education sector. Kindergarten teachers’ salaries were linked with primary teachers’ salaries but non-kindergarten early education salaries were not.
Funding for non-kindergarten early education over the last 10 years had not accounted for salary increases and this would need to be addressed, Hipkins said.
Reducing the number of children per teacher was also crucial. The standing teacher to child ratio for under 2-year-olds was 1:5 and for children over 2 it was 1:10.
The ambition was to bring those ratios down to 1:4 and 1:5, respectively. More teachers would need to be trained to accomplish this.
‘‘We’ve got a teacher shortage across the board and that’s one of the reasons why the plan is spread over 10 years, because we have to actually be able to increase the number of teachers and we have to do that without taking teachers away from other parts of the system.’’