Teachers at around 100 early childhood centres will go on strike on Wednesday as they call for better funding and work conditions.
It's the first time teachers from early childhood centres have gone on strike, with New Zealand Educational Institute Te Riu Roa representative Megan White saying the current system is broken.
“The Government’s current ECE funding arrangement is a ‘one size fits all’ model, set to the minimum teacher: child ratios. Funding rates do not reflect many of these community services that provide better than minimum ratios, and more experienced qualified kaiako," White said.
Chief executive of Early Childhood Education New Zealand Kathy Wolfe told AM on Wednesday there will be quite a few parents affected.
"So there will be quite a few services that will be closed today due to their teachers being on strike. So this will have quite a remarkable impact on parents today," she said.
Wolfe told AM it's getting close to a crisis for the sector as they struggle to attract new staff to help ease the teacher shortages.
"Whilst we've got a funding challenge and it's moving into a crisis now, we've also got teacher shortages. So it is about not only attracting more teachers into the profession but retaining the current teachers that we've got," she said.
With National being voted into power, this could also affect early childhood centres. To fund National's tax cuts, the party plans to scrap the 20 hours free early childhood funding.
Wolfe told AM if that were to occur it would have a significant impact.
"It's going to impact quite significantly and will just put the sector into further crisis," she told AM.
"For us, it'll be a sad day if the new government does axe the under 2 [year-old] 20 hours. Their family boost also doesn't reach a big enough number of families. It's only a small portion of it. We've got over 200,000 children in early childhood education. I don't think that that family boost will even reach 2 percent."
Watch the full interview with Kathy Wolfe in the video above.
