Minister Seymour’s ECE “Achievements” In His First Year

Following Minister Seymour’s speech this week on his achievements for early childhood education, the Office of ECE can provide comment.

Chief advisor to the OECE, Dr Sarah Alexander said that Minister Seymour had been effective in encouraging ECE operators and groups who don’t prioritise the well-being of children to come out of the woodwork.

“We’ve heard views against some necessary regulations for children, as well as views against compliance checks, being investigated after serious incidents have occurred that involve children, and allowing parents to make anonymous complaints against their ECE service”, said Dr Alexander.

Dr Alexander said the consultation process for the review of ECE regulations was useful because the Ministry for Regulation realised that mistruths about regulations were being promoted. This has led the Ministry to release a document correcting some of the common misconceptions.

Minster Seymour’s stated achievements for ECE in the last year are:

1. Getting rid of network approval - the object of which was to address the oversupply of ECE services in some areas and the under supply in others.

As a result of this change the Ministry of Education must now allow new services, that don’t meet community needs better, to open in areas where there is already an oversupply of services. The establishment of new ECE services in areas where there is a shortage is no longer encouraged – there is nothing that supports improving access to ECE for families, especially those most disadvantaged. The removal of network approval flew in the face of the evidence. The Ministry of Education had advised that “providers have changed the focus of their provision after engaging in the process of approval to better reflect the needs of the community.”

2. Removing a new law to ensure that the role of ‘person responsible’ for supervising children and staff is not given to someone who does not hold a full practising teacher certificate.

Undoing this law change supports service operators to replace experienced teachers with beginner teachers and place them in leadership positions often without mentoring and support (as inexperienced teachers are cheaper to employ). Beginning teachers can find it very stressful to be put in this situation, leading to burnout and leaving their job. The removal of this requirement increases risk for children of harm and poor learning outcomes.

3. Scrapping the minimum qualification requirement for educators working for licensed home-based agencies from Jan 1, 2025. Home-based service operators are currently required to have at least 60% of their educators with a basic level 4 qualification or higher, with the rest studying toward a qualification. The 60% requirement and the planned increase to 80% from the start of 2025 have both been scrapped.

This change is predicted to result in a drop in numbers of qualified home-based educators since service operators are no longer incentivised to support their educators to gain a qualification. It also removes a career pathway for educators into becoming fully qualified ECE teachers and supporting the ECE sector to improve teacher supply numbers. This change does not support parent confidence in home-based services to provide a professional level of care and education that is better than what any babysitter provides.

4. Removing a rule that when certificated teachers are on leave or to provide cover for a staff vacancy, centres had to at least try to find another certificated teacher to fill the gap in order to receive certificated teacher funding.

This change means centres can now routinely (without question) seek to place unqualified adults temporarily in certificated teacher positions without this affecting their funding for the certificated teacher positions. This decreases opportunity for children to experience care and education from someone who is trained and meets the standards of the teaching profession.

5. Excluding teachers who are not placed on a permanent employment agreement from being paid at the appropriate pay rate on the salary attestation scales for centres claiming higher levels of funding for pay parity.

When making this change, Minister Seymour did not put safeguards in place to ensure centres won’t reduce permanently employed teacher numbers and increase non-permanent employees (including those on fixed-term contracts and those with minimum hours of work per week guaranteed). Providing they do not offer a permanent employment agreement to their certificated teachers, ECE operators can now pay qualified and skilled teachers as little as the minimum adult wage for a worker in NZ, while the funding that the ECE operator gets to help to pay higher salaries has not been reduced or affected in any way.

Furthermore, Minister Seymour has said he does not support pay parity for the teachers of our youngest children. And, he has allowed the pay gap to begin to progressively increase again between the pay of teachers in non-‘kindergarten’ ECE and teachers in kindergartens and schools.

In addition to the above “achievements”, the government removed $7.698 million in funding to support the extension of 20-Hours ECE and to make 20-Hours ECE free for families. No safeguards were put in place to ensure that families do not have to pay to access their 20-Hours entitlement. And as noted in the ECE Parents’ Council submission to the Ministry for Regulation, there are no fees caps and nothing to limit fee increases.

It is clear that Minister Seymour’s focus has been on measures primarily aimed at reducing business expenses and giving service operators more freedom to operate cheaply and with less oversight.

But the OECE remains hopeful that Minister Seymour and the government will expand their focus to doing good for children and families.

“With any luck having made these changes already the Minister may now turn his focus towards doing good for children and families,” said Dr Alexander.

And here are seven ideas offered by the OECE of how Minister Seymour can begin to usefully direct his energy.

1. Review the changes made in the last year, and repeal these or put safeguards in place to prevent the changes from causing harm to children and families, and to the quality of the ECE workforce.
2. Address systemic issues that have created a lax approach to ensuring minimum standards of practice in ECE services. Resource the Ministry of Education to regularly and properly monitor ECEs. Require the Ministry to make data publicly available on serious incidents and service non-compliances, so families and politicians can know what’s really going on. Ensure service operators are well educated on the rules and requirements for ECEs and understand the importance of these and their obligations.
3. Establish new regulation to ensure at least 50% ECE qualified teachers on-site in education and care centres when children are present.
4. Institute regulation for group-size (maximum class size number). And, change how the adult-child ratio is calculated from how many adults are in the service to how many adults are with each class or group of children.
5. Promote child protection by requiring ECEs to report suspected child abuse to Oranga Tamariki, requiring doors on children’s toilet cubicles for privacy, and banning centres from allowing or asking staff to use personal cell phones and electronic devices for taking images of children.
6. State a commitment to improving pay parity for all ECE teachers.
7. Develop a plan to address issues with teacher supply, quality, and retention, with a timeline for putting effective solutions in place. Note that in a press release on 16 April 2024 concerning his plans for cutting red tape, the minister acknowledged a “lack of fully certificated teachers”. The Minister has not yet responded to a report on this matter provided to him in May 2024 by the OECE’s Early Childhood Education Advisory Committee (ECAC).

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