Tips & Tricks

Up until the 1^st October 2024, services have been able to utilise a third year student to make up their percentage and receive funding, however service had to show that all measures had been taken to fill the gap with a qualified reliever first.

From 1^st October 2024, service no longer have to show their efforts to find a qualified reliever before using discretionary hours.

What does this mean? Each service has access to 80 Discretionary hours per funding round (a funding round is four months). Services are now able to capitalise on these hours, filling a qualified spot with the third year student, and still receive funding as though that person was qualified. However, children then receive the care and Education relevant to a third year students expertise and not a fully qualified kaiako.

From the 1^st October 2024, services can pay qualified Kaiako on casual contracts at minimum wage rather than their deserved pay parity rate.

What does this mean? Qualified casual teachers who potentially have years of experience are being paid far less than their permanent colleagues. For profit services may employ a higher number of qualified teachers on casual contracts because they are now cheaper. Because on a casual contract, you cannot be found to be working a set pattern, you may find these services rotate these teachers frequently, therefore impacting on the consistency of the teaching team for children, as well as the children’s ability to build strong and trusting relationships with their teachers.

We are all lead to believe that when choosing a service, we can rely on that services ERO report, found online. This is no longer the case. Service providers who oversee the running of eight or more services are now review collectively, with only a ‘sample’ of their centres being physically visited by ERO. ERO believes it is appropriate that as little as 5.8% of these services are visited and they can adequately review the entire body of services by doing so.

What does this mean? As there are many services out there who are running under the umbrella of larger organisations, it can easily be assumed that a majority of services in New Zealand are no longer being adequately reviewed, or accountable for providing best practice in their services. ECE services are not all created equally, and it cannot be assumed that simply because a body of services is owned or overseen by one organisation, that they are all running smoothly and best practice, licencing criteria, regulations etc. are adhered to.

There is a list compiled by the Office of Early childhood Education outlining the services that have breached the Licencing Criteria and as a result, had the licence dropped to provisional, or cancelled completely.

There are four areas of the licencing criteria, Premises and Facilities, Health and Safety, Curriculum and Governance and Management. You will see within the list each area that the service has been found to be in breach of.

In the interests of transparency, Ako Rolleston featured on this list in 2020. When a service is taken over by new owners, the service must go through a relicensing process. During our relicensing process, it was found that we had taken over a service that in fact did not meet most, if not all of the licensing criteria. There is no way to know this before the take over, and we were given a provisional licence for three months to give us time to completely rewrite all our policies, and do a complete playground makeover, along with other smaller projects that needed to happen. We then received our full licence and have been on it since.

It may be helpful to bare this in mind, if you see a service on this list, where it mentions relicensing. It is possible the services experience is similar to ours.

oece.nz/public/information/standards/2024-list-ece-regulation-breaches/

We have created a checklist of things to ask or look out for when visiting services.

• Are you able to call into the service at a time that works for you and your family, or do you have to make a booking?
• Is the services licence displayed in the foyer? Is it full or provisional?
• Do you see the names and qualifications of each person counted towards regulated qualification requirements? How many are there? Do you feel it is adequate?
• Are the Regulations and Licencing Criteria displayed, and can you see the Complaints procedure?
• Ask about the teachers, how many are qualified, how many in training and how many unqualified. The numbers of these teachers will impact the quality of care and education your child/ren receive.
• Look at the teachers, do they seem happy, are they smiling? Do they look like they are genuinely interested in the care and education of the children attending?
• How do the teacher and centre manager engage with each other?
• How about the children, do they look happy? Are they engaged? Do they seem like they have good relationships with their teachers?
• Does the service seem well resourced?

Social media plays a big part in our lives these days. While it can be helpful to look to these avenues for recommendations, allow this information to only form part of your decision. Relying on other peoples’ opinions can cloud your decision making, when often you are only hearing peoples perception of what they have experienced.

It is important you check things out for yourself, get your own vibes and feelings, and do your own research