Victoria offers cash incentives for Canberra early childhood teachers to relocate

Victoria has been advertising for qualified early childhood teachers and educators to deliver three-year-old kindergarten, sweetening the deal with a $9000 bonus and up to $6000 in relocation support.

Teachers who get a job at selected Victorian early childhood services can get a location incentive of up to $50,000.

Victoria needs to boost its workforce ahead of the rollout of an additional year of universal, full-time early education before children start school.

Education Minister Yvette Berry said the ACT would not be providing relocation incentives at this stage.

"What we need to do is work on a national plan," Ms Berry said.

"It's no good each state and territory poaching teaching professionals off each other."

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Education ministers have been working on a national teacher workforce plan, with each state and territory releasing its own plan.

The ACT government released a teacher attraction and retention plan which showed the territory's public education system would need up to 348 new teachers depending on the number of retirements.

The Education Directorate will publish recruitment targets annually under the plan.

Ms Berry said the focus of the current enterprise agreement negotiations with the Australian Education Union was to improve conditions to attract and retain teachers.

The directorate was also implementing recommendations from the teacher shortage taskforce.

"We want to be able to recruit new teachers and also importantly, look after our own existing teachers and make sure that they have a safe and happy work environment where they're valued and respected," Ms Berry said.

She said the negotiations were continuing in good faith.

Union members signalled they would be prepared to walk off the job over staff shortages and escalating workload.

The union has called for a 7.5 per cent annual pay increase or the ACT consumer price index plus 1 per cent, whichever is greater.

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