When Qualifications Don’t Count: A Growing Gap in Educator Pay
Tammy Lawlor, VSKEA Founder
Not long ago, we wrote about a historic shift in early childhood education, a moment where long standing issues around pay, recognition, and gender undervaluation were finally being acknowledged. But as that shift begins to take shape, there’s a growing disconnect that we can’t ignore.
Right now, across parts of the sector, Diploma qualified educators are being paid in ways that simply don’t reflect their qualifications, their classification, or the legal framework that’s supposed to protect them. And that matters, not just for individuals, but for the integrity of the entire system.
The contradiction we can’t ignore
Let’s start with what should be straightforward. Educators are:
required to hold Diploma qualifications
employed under contracts that recognise those qualifications
classified and paid as Diploma-level educators (for example, VECTEA 2020 Educators Diploma Qualified Level 2.1 to 2.3)
And yet, the actual hourly rates being applied, around $29.41 according to Seek advertisements and diploma payslips in the sector, tell a very different story. This rate sits not only below the minimum for Diploma qualified educators under the March 1 Children’s Services Award amendments, but even below entry-level Certificate III rates.
This isn’t a small discrepancy. It’s a fundamental misalignment between what educators are recognised as and what they are paid.
Why the Award still matters
There can be confusion here, so let’s be clear. Enterprise agreements, such as the VECTEA, set pay and conditions for specific groups of employees. But they don’t replace the safety net, they sit on top of it. That safety net, for Diploma qualified educators, is the Children’s Services Award. And under the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT), applied by the Fair Work Commission, employees covered by an agreement must be better off overall than they would be under the Award.
In other words: The Award is the benchmark. Not a suggestion, a baseline. So when agreement rates fall below Award minimums for the relevant classification, it raises serious and necessary questions about how that benchmark is being met.
When a qualification exists, but has no value
This is where the issue becomes bigger than pay rates. Diploma qualifications in early childhood education are not optional extras. They are:
required by the sector
recognised in contracts
recorded in payroll systems
embedded in classification structures
And yet, in practice, they are not being reflected in pay. When a system requires a qualification, acknowledges it in writing, and classifies employees on that basis, but fails to pay accordingly, it sends a very clear message: the qualification exists, but it has no economic value. The consequences of that are not abstract. Over time, it:
discourages educators from pursuing higher qualifications
flattens career progression
undermines retention of skilled staff
weakens the broader goal of professionalising early childhood education
At a moment when the sector is calling for increased recognition, this kind of disconnect risks pulling in the opposite direction.
A system that relies on qualifications it doesn’t reward
There is another layer to this, and it goes to the heart of how the sector operates. Under the National Quality Framework, services must meet qualification requirements set and overseen by Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority. In many cases, this includes ensuring that at least 50% of educators hold a Diploma-level qualification or higher.
So the system clearly says Diploma-qualified educators are essential to quality.
Services rely on those qualifications to meet regulatory requirements. They are counted, recorded, and central to compliance. And yet, when it comes to pay, that same qualification can effectively disappear. Not in title, but in value. This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question:
If Diploma qualifications are critical for compliance and quality, why are they not consistently recognised in pay?
The risk to a “historic shift”
None of this exists in a vacuum. Early childhood education is a deeply gendered workforce, and the issue of undervaluation has been formally recognised after years of advocacy. That recognition matters. But recognition alone is not enough. When highly qualified educators are:
classified at a higher level
required for regulatory compliance
but paid below minimum benchmarks
it becomes difficult to argue that the system has truly moved beyond the patterns of undervaluation it has long been defined by.
Where to from here?
This is more than just a technical issue, it’s about what the sector is willing to accept. Right now, we are being asked to accept a system where:
qualifications are required, but not properly paid
classifications exist, but are not meaningfully upheld
and minimum standards are treated as flexible, rather than foundational
That should concern everyone because it is hard to imagine this level of disconnect being tolerated in a workforce that was not so overwhelmingly female. Harder still to ignore who makes up that workforce: a significant proportion of educators are women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, whose skills, qualifications, and labour continue to be relied upon, and undervalued. This is not accidental, it is structural, and it needs to be named.
A sector that depends on qualified educators cannot continue to treat those qualifications as optional when it comes to pay. A system that mandates Diploma level staffing for quality and compliance cannot turn around and disregard that same level when it comes to remuneration. The question is no longer “how did this happen?” The question is: what are we going to do about it?
A “historic shift” that doesn’t show up in pay packets is not a shift at all. It’s a rebrand. And if the sector is serious about change, about equity, about professionalism, about valuing educators, then this is the moment to prove it. Not in statements. Not in frameworks. In wages.
Anything less isn’t reform, it’s continuation.