Children need trained teachers at every stage
SOMETIME back in the Middle Ages, I attended Brooklyn Play Centre. Though I remember enjoying pushing some twin sisters down a bank, I also remember having a great time with play-dough, finger painting, buildings large ‘‘forts’’ out of blocks (which sometimes mysteriously collapsed on a certain pair of siblings), stories, dressing up and singing.
I saw it as play. If someone had told me it was greatly assisting my ‘‘cognitive development’’, I would have been straight down the dirt bank looking for more twins.
It is only when I see the latest ERO (Education Review Office) report into ECE (Early Childhood Education) that I realise that a) educators love acronyms and b) I was engaged in an excellent educational programme. Yet if the ERO report is to be believed, nearly half of our children 3 and under will not be as lucky.
Don’t panic too much; our ECE centres are apparently safe, nurturing and warm.
It’s just that nearly half of them are lacking when it comes to actually teaching.
According to the ERO, some of our ECE institutions are not fostering and extending the interests of very young students.
What that means in English is that down the track many of our children will end up working in untrained minimum wage jobs, perhaps at ECE centres, and not as entrepreneurs and engineers as Steven Joyce would like.
But surely those 3 and under are too young to learn? They can’t even read.
According to the experts, the early years are when much real learning occurs. The brain is developing and children need stimulating, not just nappy changing.
Remember the ghastly images of the stone-faced, Ceausescu-era Romanian orphans who’d simply been left in a cot for their early years?
But if you want our ECE centres to educate our very young, it helps if the staff know about how children develop and learn. To do that, specialist training is needed.
Yet, despite the Government saying it is committed to quality education, ECE centres are allowed to have up to half their staff untrained.
Before 2008, there was a government commitment to 100 per cent of staff in ECE being trained. That’s much the same as the rules for primary and secondary education – the exception being charter schools.
But that commitment is no longer. It’s the same with ratios. At the moment, ECE centres have a maximum ratio of one staff to five children. The Government promised to reduce it to one-tofour but that has not happened. It can’t help when our education minister is no fan of reducing ratios elsewhere.
In an ECE centre where there are both trained and untrained staff, who do you think gets to spend the most time with the very young? Apparently the untrained staff.
Though there are some very good private operators, it must be tempting for centres where profit is the motive to keep untrained staff numbers at around 50 per cent rather than hire more expensive trained staff.
With just over 96 per cent of pre-school children engaged in ECE, the Government is justifiably proud of nearly reaching its target of 98 per cent in ‘‘quality’’ ECE by 2016.
Except it seems that nearly half of this country’s ‘‘quality’’ ECE is not actually quality.
Has our Government focused too much on quantity? Are our very young the educational equivalent of piles of logs, with enormous untapped potential, sitting on a Wellington wharf awaiting export?
You could argue that much of the staff’s day at an ECE centre is spent on caring, not teaching.
Perhaps, but as Louise Green of the NZEI (New Zealand Educational Institute) says, ‘‘untrained staff . . . don’t understand child development or how to turn a simple interaction into a teaching moment’.
I remember discussing the issue with two Right-wing politicians, both mothers, recently. They believed teaching school-age children was relatively difficult but teaching the very young was much easier because ‘‘you don’t have to know so much’’.
As much as I was tempted to hurl them both down a bank, I wonder if their attitude is actually more representative of the Government’s true thinking than ministers who mouth platitudes about ‘‘quality’’ but don’t back it up with funding and regulations.
The brain is developing and children need stimulating, not just nappy changing.