While the Government's focus as of late has been on addressing the struggles of New Zealand's primary and secondary school teachers, our early childhood education centres are also in dire straits due to a teacher shortage, according to a recent survey.
The survey found that a third of centres can't fill vacancies.
That's a massive change from just a few years ago when there was an oversupply of early childhood teachers in New Zealand and many couldn't find work, Early Childhood Council CEO Peter Reynolds told Breakfast yesterday.
"Back in 2012, one tertiary institute produced something like 1000 new graduate teachers, who couldn't find jobs in the sector. People were applying for jobs, but the growth in the sector wasn't fast enough at that point," he said.
"But since then we've seen a retrenchment, and part of that's due to slashes in government funding that took effect back in 2010, 2011. We're seeing the effect of that now.
"Centres can't find teachers for love nor money. Agencies that provide teachers on short term relief basis are effectively closing down because they simply can't find teachers."
While having the Government spend more money on recruitment would help in the long term, temporarily relaxing regulations on the teacher-to-child ratio until the issue can be sorted would provide immediate relief to the sector, he said. He also suggested changing immigration rules.
"If people are qualified and they speak English, we should be right at the moment making it a bit easier for those people to come in," he said.
"We're sitting down with the ministry right now, saying, 'Look, you're talking about how many shortages there are in schools, and what needs to be done to sort that out. And you're providing some funding for recruitment campaigns and the like, but you're not doing anything about early childhood education. That area deserves just as much attention.'"
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