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 — isn't ordinary time and needs to be handled through the award's overtime provisions, 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 1.819% 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 11.3).
- 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 was consolidated as recently as 28 May 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.