Coverage and the teacher boundary
MA000120 covers employers in the children's services and early childhood education industry — long day care, occasional care, outside school hours care and similar services — and their employees in the award's classifications: educators, assistants, cooks, support and administrative staff. The main boundary to watch: degree-qualified early childhood teachers employed to teach typically fall under the Educational Services (Teachers) Award instead, so a single room can contain staff on two different awards. As always, duties decide — an ECT-qualified employee working as a room educator is classified by the work actually performed.
Ordinary hours: the 6am–6:30pm span
Clause 21 sets the frame most rostering decisions live inside:
- Ordinary hours are worked between 6.00am and 6.30pm, Monday to Friday (clause 21.3).
- Shifts are worked in unbroken periods of up to 8 hours (meal breaks aside) — extendable to 10 hours by agreement (clause 21.2).
- Where broken shifts are worked, the spread of hours is capped at 12 per day.
Work outside the span — an early-morning bus run before 6am, a centre event running past 6:30pm — is outside the clause 21.3 span, so it is paid at overtime rates under clause 23 unless the employee is employed as a shiftworker under clause 23.4. Shiftworkers can be rostered outside the span as ordinary hours, with a shift loading instead: 10% for an early morning shift (commencing at or after 5.00am and before 6.00am) and 15% for an afternoon shift (finishing after 6.30pm and at or before midnight). Either way, it should be handled deliberately, not silently absorbed into the roster.
Broken shifts and minimum engagements
Split days — the before-and-after-school-care double being the classic — attract a broken shift allowance of 1.733% of the award's standard rate per day on each day a broken shift is worked. Because it's a percentage, the dollar amount moves with each wage review; the current figure is in the FWO pay guide for MA000120.
Minimums:
- Part-time employees must be rostered for a minimum of 2 consecutive hours per shift (clause 10.4).
- Casual employees are paid a minimum of 2 hours per engagement (clause 10.5(c)).
- Saturday, Sunday and public holiday work carries a minimum payment of 4 hours.
OSHC services paying a 90-minute after-school session as 1.5 hours are underpaying every session — the same minimum-payment failure mode we see constantly in SCHADS timesheets.
Non-contact time: the entitlement almost nobody delivers in full
Clause 21.5 is the award's most distinctive — and most breached — entitlement:
- An employee responsible for preparing, implementing or evaluating a developmental program for a child or group is entitled to a minimum of 2 hours of non-contact time per week.
- The appointed Educational Leader is entitled to a further minimum of 2 hours per week for leadership duties.
- These are cumulative: an Educational Leader who also has programming responsibility is entitled to at least 4 hours per week (Note 2 to clause 21.5).
During non-contact time the employee must not be required to supervise children or perform other directed duties — programming done while watching a sleep room doesn't count. It should be rostered in advance wherever possible. The compliance failure is rarely refusal; it's ratio pressure quietly consuming the rostered non-contact hours week after week, which is both an underpayment-adjacent breach and a documented pattern regulators and unions look for.
The 2026 picture
The award text is consolidated to include variations up to 1 July 2026, and all minimum rates rose 4.75% from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026 — so any rate table configured before July is now stale, and percentage-based allowances like the broken shift allowance moved with the standard rate. Sector funding changes (including the wage-support arrangements flowing through early childhood) sit on top of the award, not instead of it: the award minimums remain the floor that payroll is audited against.
Checking a specific scenario
For a concrete question — whether a 5:45am opening shift is overtime, how the broken shift allowance applies to a split OSHC day, what an Educational Leader's non-contact entitlement is when they also program for a room — our Awards Assistant answers from the actual text of MA000120 with clause citations, alongside SCHADS, the Aged Care Award and the other major care-sector instruments.