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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.
Note#
See 'Chapter 3-B-2 Determining a teachers initial salary scale' for detail of changes to requirements from 1 July 2025 – 30 June 2027 for newly certificated teachers and certificated teachers that are new to working in the New Zealand ECE sector.
Following the July 2025 funding period, a 2-year moratorium on services who have currently attested to paying permanently employed certificated teachers at Parity and Extended Parity salary scale amounts will take effect. These services will not be able to attest to paying higher salary scales after the July 2025 funding payment, for a period of 2 years. This moratorium will prevent these services from attesting to higher salary scales, but it will not prevent any service from attesting to lower salary scales during this time.
Restrictions during moratorium#
If a service attests to a lower salary scale, they will not be able to revert to their previous higher salary scale unless they opted into the Base salary scale or opt out of the Pay Parity scheme for a full attestation period.
For example, if a service attests to Full Parity in the July 2025 funding period and then moves to Extended Parity in the November 2025 funding period, they will not be able to attest to Full Parity again in the following (March 2026) funding period.
Exceptions to the moratorium#
Services that attest to paying Base salary scale or that had opted out of the Pay Parity scheme for a full attestation period, new services, and services that undergo a change in ownership, during the moratorium.
These services will be able to attest to paying any salary scale, however, after doing so will be subject to the conditions of the moratorium mentioned above.
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:
