Widespread wage theft across childcare sector and pressure on overworked staff, research reveals

Australia Broadcast Center

19 hours ago

Unsustainable expectations on childcare workers are leading to "massive burnout" and compromising child safety, according to a first-of-its-kind Australian study.
It also found widespread wage theft across the sector, with more than 70 per cent of educators working an average of 7–9 hours of unpaid work each week.
The research from the University of Sydney comes amid a crisis of confidence in the industry following revelations about poor child safety standards at some centres and allegations of child sexual abuse by a worker in Victoria.
"Over 70 per cent of our educators say that they are working unpaid hours every single week and for those educators, they're reporting an average of 9 unpaid hours each week — we end up with massive burnout," said lead researcher Dr Erin Harper from Sydney University.
The study was based on a survey of almost 600 educators.
"Another significant finding was educators' concerns around workload and how that is then interfering with their ability to provide quality education and care," she said.
Childcare worker Yingzhao Zhu has worked across some 50 centres over a decade and said staff were struggling, not just with caring for the children but with the hours of administration, cleaning and even taking out the rubbish — tasks known in the industry as "non-contact" time.
"To be very honest, doing all of those things in a day and over the weeks, it's pretty hard," Ms Zhu said.
Dr Harper's research found the mounting toll of those tasks being spread between too few workers meant staff were only spending 2.5 hours of quality time with children every day.
"In our study, over 70 per cent of educators are telling us they are concerned that children are not getting enough of their time," Dr Harper said.
"And over 70 per cent are specifically identifying non-contact workload as detracting from quality within their service."
Penny* is a childcare worker at a not-for-profit provider, who spoke to ABC News on the condition her identity be protected to allow her to speak freely about problems at her workplace.
Childcare workers like Penny are required by law to have a number of "non-contact" hours to design lessons and materials for the children.
She said the centre continually pushing to enrol more children meant she was often forced to complete this work in her own time, with implications for the children in her care.
"I engage students throughout the whole day but when I have those stressful situations, it affects my work even though I don't want to show it," Penny said.
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She said the centre was forced to rely on casual workers to complete required administrative work or to fill staffing holes, which increased the risk of accidents because they did not have a relationship with the children.
"When you change with another educator and then an accident occurs, it's frustrating because if I was there, because of the relationship, it might be avoided," she said.
That dynamic put pressure on her to put the children first, which meant completing administrative work unpaid and out of hours.
Carolyn Smith from the United Workers Union said employers were taking advantage of staff who were often intrinsically motivated to work in the sector to care for children.
"It's impacting educators, it's impacting children and it's certainly impacting quality and safety of care."
Dr Harper would like her research to lead to a stocktake of all the tasks childcare workers are required to complete, which often includes providing lengthy updates for parents.
That would allow a more realistic appraisal of the number of staff required and better-quality care.
"When we look at educators' paid hours, then non-contact workload accounts for about 25 per cent of their time," Dr Harper said.
"But when we account for the entirety of their work hours, so including those unpaid hours, it increases to about 40 per cent."
In a statement, Minister for Early Childhood Education Jess Walsh said the findings of the report were "troubling".
"The foundation of quality in early education is supporting a stable and dedicated workforce," Ms Walsh said.
"That's why the Albanese Government is rolling out a 15 per cent pay rise to early educators so they can afford to stay in the sector to provide quality education and care."
Ms Walsh said advertised vacancies had fallen by a little more than 25 per cent this year.
*Name changed to protect identity.