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Policy
Higher funding rates are available to education and care services who pay all employed certificated teachers at least the minimum salaries described in Appendix 4.
Base funding rates which reflect the proportion of certificated teacher hours used are available to services that agree to pay all employed certificated teachers at least the amount specified at Step 1 of the salary scale.
Parity funding rates are available to education and care services who agree to pay all employed certificated teachers according to Step 1 to 6 of the Parity Salary Scale.
Extended parity funding rates are available to education and care services who agree to pay all employed certificated teachers according to Step 1 to 11 + Management Step of the Extended Parity Salary Scale.
Full Parity funding rates are available to education and care services who agree to pay all employed certificated teachers according to Steps 1 to 11 + Management steps of the Full Parity Salary Scale.
Rationale
Ensuring that certificated teachers are fairly recognised and rewarded for their qualifications and experience in alignment with certificated teachers in kindergarten. This will, among other things, assist with increasing the number of certificated teachers working in early childhood education.
Attestation on the RS7 return
The Attestation of Certificated Teachers’ Salaries is used to determine the funding rate an education and care or hospital-based service is paid.
In this section respondents will be answering the following question:
What salary scale described in the ECE Funding Handbook is your service using to determine the minimum salaries paid to all employed ECE and primary qualified certificated teachers?
To answer this question respondents will choose one of 4 options:
- No Salary Scale (No step).
- Base Salary Scale (Step 1).
- Parity Salary Scale (Step 1-6).
- Extended Parity Salary Scale (Partial Step 1-11 + Partial Management Step).
- Full Parity Salary Scale (Full Step 1-11 + Full Management Steps).
When selecting an option, the respondent must ensure that their service has paid all employed certificated teachers at least the minimum salary for the period of the RS7 return.
Services are not required to offer the terms of the Kindergarten Teachers, Head Teachers and Senior Teachers' Collective Agreement.
Delegated representatives and the attestation on the RS7 return
It is the responsibility of a service provider to ensure that any delegated representative, who may complete an RS7 return on their behalf, understand what attestation condition their service has met prior to submitting their service’s RS7 return.
Attestation period
When completing the Attestation of Certificated Teachers’ Salaries section of the RS7 return, a service is confirming what funding conditions they have met for the RS7 return period.
| Funding period | Attestation period |
|---|---|
| March | October - January |
| July | February - May |
| November | June - September |
A service’s funding rate will be adjusted if they are found to have not met the necessary funding conditions for the entire funding period. Any funding recoveries resulting from this change in funding rates will be made during the next funding payment.
Note: For the November 2023 funding round the attestation period for funding conditions related to Full Parity Salary Scale Steps 1 to 11 + Full Management steps start from November 2023.
Funding rate outcome from attestation response
The following diagram represents what funding rates will be paid given the combination of answers to the attestation questions.
Example
An example of the required attestation is shown below:
