Balancing Qualified Staff Requirements with Shortage of Recruits in Child Care – The NSW Experience

In Australia and many other countries, government regulations require that children's services, such as long day care centres and preschools, employ certain numbers of qualified early childhood teachers. This recognises that training and experience of staff are the most significant factors determining the quality of care. At the same time Australia is facing a shortage of qualified early childhood teachers, and governments are grappling with how staff requirements can be met. In this article we examine the New South Wales Government approach, which waives temporarily the requirement to employ qualified teachers if children's services providers can show that they have made all reasonable effort at recruiting the required staff. We consider the impact of the temporary waiver on quality of care, and whether it is necessary to compromise government standards in this way. Our research concludes that most providers committed to good quality care do not resort to using the temporary waiver

Business · Compromise · Economic shortage · Government (linguistics · Medical education · Political science · Project commissioning · Public relations · Publishing · Quality (philosophy · Waiver · Early Childhood Education and Development · Education Systems and Policy · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Nursing Roles and Practices

• The Politics of Australian Child Care

  Open Access•Deborah Brennan•Politics of Australian Child Care•1998

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