Making traineeships work for the care and support sector
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Usually, an industry encourages more people to get qualified and enter a profession by doing an apprenticeship.
Disability support workers technically qualify for apprenticeship subsidies, but they’re not working at all.
They’re woefully inadequate, covering only 10% of the wage costs, at the maximum.
Workers under the NDIS receive hardly any funding for training or supervision, as is. So how do providers find the funding to take on a trainee, let alone cover the additional backfilling, supervision, mentoring, training costs for the trainee.
Consider the extra costs, and you’ll find an incentive payment totalling $5,000 goes nowhere.
And even when workers are on traineeships, they’re often paid far below the rate of a worker employed on the SCHADS Award.
Under these conditions, why would a NDIS worker or a provider want to engage in a traineeship?
The Government announced higher apprentice payments for clean energy apprenticeships just this year, because it considers the net zero transformation as priority.
But so is the care and support economy.
Read more about our campaign for full-pay care and support traineeships here.
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