Govt announces changes to ECE sector
WELLINGTON: The government has announced changes to the early childhood education sector, which it says will make it easier for new centres to be set up.
Act New Zealand leader David Seymour announced the moves at a Wellington ECE centre, where he read to children while sitting next to a book featuring Jacinda Ardern, before telling reporters the former prime minister was an authoritarian.
He has also signalled plans to introduce mandatory child abuse reporting, while noting the government has not yet made a firm decision on that fraught debate.
The changes will revoke legislative changes allowing the government to decide where early learning services should be, and requirements for ECE centres to have a highlytrained teacher in charge before being allowed to open.
Announcing the changes, Mr Seymour — the Minister for Regulation and Associate Education — said the decision about where services should be located should lie with parents and providers.
‘‘Any other business, the test of whether there’s demand is ‘do people come and give you their money in return for your services?’, not ‘can you satisfy a government department that people might want to do that if you’re allowed to open?’.
‘‘Ultimately you can’t make someone open a centre, and you can’t make a parent send their kid to a centre — all you can do with network approval is restrict centres from opening where the parents might have actually wanted one.’’
The government is also cancelling a change that would have taken effect in August, requiring any ECE centre to have a more highly qualified teacher to be in charge to be permitted to open.
It would have meant at least one teacher with a Full Practising Certificate (category one or two) would need to be on site. Mr Seymour said the current setting — requiring any registered teacher — would now remain.
‘‘Theoretically you would have to close while that one person went to the bathroom. If that one person you might have was sick you would have to pay a very expensive reliever in order to open.’’
He said the government would also be doing a funding review, including of the pay parity rules ‘‘which are creating enormous cost and inflexibility for the sector’’.
Ahead of his announcement at a centre in Wellington, Mr Seymour read Oi Frog! to the children there. Another book, Taking the Lead: How Jacinda Ardern wowed the world had been placed prominently alongside him.
Mr Seymour would ‘‘absolutely’’ have read the Jacinda Ardern book to the children, but said Oi Frog! was a lot more entertaining and ironically Oi Frog! seemed to be a warning to children about authoritarian people that tell you what to do all the time.
‘‘Maybe that’s why they have the Jacinda book — for a similar purpose — who knows?’’
He defended his characterisation of Dame Jacinda as authoritarian.
‘‘I think the way that she used power through the Covid era was excessive, it didn’t properly balance New Zealanders rights and their welfare and in some cases it actually was found to be illegal.’’
While the legislation is repealed, Mr Seymour is proposing to speed up granting approvals for new services by revoking the national statement on the network of licensed early childhood services. Consultation on this proposal is now open and runs until May 5.
Early Childhood Council chief executive Simon Laube said the sector was ‘‘really, really relieved’’ by the moves, as it was ‘‘incredibly difficult’’ to set up a new ECE centre.
He said some of the safety regulations were just boxticking exercises adding extra cost, and ECE centres in Wellington had closed despite high levels of demand with no new centres expected in the next few years.
But Labour’s Education spokeswoman Jan Tinetti said the changes to location requirements were ‘‘really disappointing’’.
‘‘To get rid of it means that we have no idea where ECEs are going to be going up, and it means that it’s inequitable because we don’t get them into places where the needs are greatest . . . this is something that parents wanted, we know that it was working really well in the first instance.’’
‘‘Rural areas will be way more disadvantaged, low socioeconomic areas will be way more disadvantaged.’’
She said some parts of the sector had backed the change because of the equity considerations, and reversing the higherskilled teacher requirement would put children at risk. — RNZ