A fundamental barrier for many people looking to build a successful career in ECEC is the low levels of remuneration.
Jobs and Skills Australia. (2024). The Future of the Early Childhood Education Profession.
Over the past decade, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector has seen significant growth, with the number of ECEC places increasing by more than 50 per cent. However, the supply of qualified educators and teachers has not kept pace with this expansion. This mismatch poses a critical challenge to the sector’s ability to meet the needs of Australian families.
Ensuring a strong pipeline of new educators and teachers entering the profession—while also retaining our existing, highly qualified workforce—is central to the sustainability and quality of early education. The recent Jobs and Skills Australia report, The Future of the Early Childhood Education Profession, confirmed that the current workforce needs to grow by approximately 16 per cent to fill existing vacancies and meet demand.
The report echoed a familiar refrain from years of workforce studies: low wages remain a fundamental barrier for many people considering a long-term career in ECEC. For too long, the sector has been caught between the pressures of maintaining affordability for families and the urgent need to offer professional wages to attract and retain staff.
For CELA and Community Child Care Association (CCC) member services, low pay and workforce shortages have consistently ranked as top concerns. As peak bodies, solving the workforce crisis has remained at the heart of our advocacy. Our members know that the future of high-quality ECEC relies on our ability to build, support and sustain the professional workforce that underpins it.
Historical barriers to improving wages and conditions
Despite broad agreement that low pay is one of the biggest challenges facing the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector, addressing this issue has proven difficult. The reasons are deeply embedded in the structure and funding of the sector. With over 17,000 services operated by around 7,000 providers across Australia, ECEC is a large and highly diverse sector. This diversity has made it difficult to create unified solutions that work for all types of services.
One of the key challenges is the ongoing tension between fees and wages. Because services rely heavily on government subsidies to keep fees affordable for families, any increase in wages risks being passed on to parents—impacting access for children and reducing parents’ ability to work. Compounding this is the sector’s reliance on the Award system, which offers only a minimum safety net rather than the ability to negotiate wages and conditions that reflect the complexity and value of the work—like those seen in the school education system.
To move forward, the sector has needed new tools that can bring together providers, educators and government to negotiate fairer outcomes. Breaking the cycle of low wages without compromising affordability requires a collaborative approach that balances the needs of families, the workforce and service viability.
How supported bargaining provided new tools and opportunities
The introduction of supported bargaining under the Secure Jobs, Better Pay legislation in 2023 offered the ECEC sector a long-awaited breakthrough. For the first time, these laws created a formal pathway for the government—as the primary funder of early education services—to come to the table and be part of direct conversations about wages. Crucially, they also offered a mechanism to ensure that wage increases could be passed on to staff, rather than absorbed by services or pushed onto families.
Recognising the significance of this shift, CCC and CELA saw an opportunity for real change on behalf of our member services—particularly those small and community-managed providers who have long struggled to compete with larger organisations on wages. As soon as the legislation passed, we began engaging our members to gauge interest in being part of the first-ever supported bargaining application. Despite the process being entirely new and untested, our members responded with enthusiasm and a willingness to lead the way.
With their support, we became employer representatives in a formal Fair Work Commission process that brought providers, workers and government together in a truly collaborative way. For the first time, government’s role as primary funder—and therefore its influence on services' capacity to pay—was formally acknowledged. This shift paved the way for the federal government’s historic announcement that it would directly fund wage increases for educators and staff.
This supported bargaining process directly led to the creation of the ECEC Multi-Employer Agreement and the announcement of the ECEC Worker Retention Payment. Without it, we would have remained stuck in the same cycle—unable to improve wages without passing costs onto families. For the first time, we’ve been able to achieve real progress on wages while maintaining affordability and access for children and families.
Why solutions like this are the way forward to continue to improve wages and conditions in our sector
While this is only the first step, the supported bargaining process has demonstrated that meaningful, lasting change in the ECEC sector is only possible when the whole sector is involved. This process brought together government, unions, large providers, small and community-managed services, not-for-profit and for-profit providers—ensuring a diverse range of voices and experiences were heard.
The breadth of participation meant that outcomes could be shaped to meet the varied needs of different service types and settings. Crucially, the involvement of government allowed for direct dialogue between on-the-ground services and the policymakers who shape funding and regulation. This connection was instrumental in achieving a solution that was both practical and scalable.
Equally important was the inclusion of staff voices. Having educators directly involved helped ensure the final outcome was grounded in the real challenges of workforce attraction and retention. This process stands as a powerful example of how reform can succeed in a sector like ours—where responsibility is shared and no single agent holds all the levers.
It’s a model built on diversity of representation, honest dialogue and a shared commitment to improving outcomes for children, families and the workforce. We believe any future major reform should build on this approach.
The impact
Together, CELA and CCC have already supported hundreds of services to access the ECEC Worker Retention Payment. The impact of this investment is already being felt on the ground. Services we’ve assisted are telling us that this support has helped them retain valued staff, boost morale, and re-energise their teams.
One such example is Coburg Children’s Centre, which shared that the payment has made a tangible difference in their ability to recognise and retain their dedicated educators. While the supported bargaining process is still new, and we are all learning as we go, the strong uptake from services applying for the grant shows just how urgent and necessary this funding was.
This experience demonstrates that real progress is possible when we work together as a sector. With the hardest first step now behind us, we can continue building on this foundation—working towards better wages, better conditions, and the recognition that early educators and teachers so rightly deserve.
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