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Welcome to the Office of Early Childhood Education
The OECE is a national organisation for the ECE sector and public adviser, championing high-quality education and care for every child
View our positions
- Provides membership support to ECE services, teachers, researchers, and community partners
- Actively contributes to sector analysis, research, and policy development
- Advances evidence-based best practices that prioritise children’s interests and wellbeing
View the Code of Conduct for ECE Services
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Membership Services and Support for:
Teacher Member Posts
Asking for More Pay – Negotiating and Pay Reviews
Asking for More Pay.
In this article we discuss:
Getting over your fear to ask for a pay rise. What your employer’s obligations are. Preparing to negotiate and what you can expect.
Getting over fear to ask for a pay rise
If you do not ask you may not get. If you believe you are due a pay rise there is no harm in asking. 
All Together Now – Providing Family Learning Sessions
Family learning sessions highlight how much parents shape their children’s development and how early childhood teachers can strengthen that impact by meaningfully engaging families. This article is essential reading for New Zealand ECE teachers because it shows why adopting these approaches can deepen partnerships with parents and enrich learning beyond the ECE setting.
Death of a Child, Parent or Other Adult
In the event of the death of a child or person known at your service, the impact will be extensive on children, yourself, members of your team and your community.
You should be open and honest with your service leader and discuss the option of seeking professional help and support for yourself, in order to be able to adequately support children
Female Teachers Annoyed at John’s Popularity as a Teacher
Male teacher popularity with children.
Why are kids always drawn to the male teacher? Our kids always go for John – it’s “Hi John” when they come in the door and they hang around him most of the day. We are feeling a bit peeved at his popularity I must say – and the fact that we are left with cleaning the tables etc. We often can
Service Provider Member Posts
ECE Policies: What’s Required, What’s Optional, and What’s Just Paperwork
Learn the difference between the documentation ECE services are required to have and the policies they often write unnecessarily.
Service leaders will benefit from understanding how to reduce paperwork, meet legal requirements efficiently, and free up time for what matters most – supporting children and staff.
Ways to Be the Best – Paths to Quality
Five Paths to Quality Improvement.
Do you want to grow and develop a service that is unique?
Would you like to see parents shouting from the rooftops about how great your service is?
Would you like to future-proof your service to help it continue to be one of the best in your local community, or even in the whole of NZ?
Aim for
Curriculum Policy
Use and adapt the following curriculum policy to suit your service and meet regulatory requirements.
Your curriculum policy must be consistent with the curriculum framework and be informed by assessment, planning, and evaluation (documented and undocumented) that demonstrates an understanding of children’s learning, their interests, whānau, and life contexts.
As well as providing a curriculum policy template for you, we’ve included the questions the Ministry of Education commonly asks and focuses on when it is checking an ECE service’s curriculum policy and implementation.
RATIONALE:
To ensure the process of planning, evaluating and delivering a localised curriculum is consistent with
The ECE Safety Checklist – Daily Hazard and Safety Checklist
The ECE Safety Checklist – A Daily Hazard and Safety Checklist for Every ECE Service. Checklist items include regulation requirements and reflect learnings from tragic incidents that have happened in ECE.
How to Use the Checklist
This checklist is to assist in conducting and recording the daily inspection.
It is more thorough and detaile
Research Library – Today’s Featured Articles
Working Towards Culturally Safe and Inclusive Early Childhood Work Environments
Research on culturally safe and inclusive early childhood work environments. Read the full paper below. Or to order a pdf copy of the article go to the main NZIRECE Journal page.
Making Inclusion Happen in Early Childhood Settings
Research on family and whānau and teacher perspectives and practices of inclusion in early childhood education settings in Aotearoa NZ. Read the full paper below. Or to order a pdf copy of the article go to the main NZIRECE Journal page.
Contents – NZ Research in ECE Journal, 2013, Vol 16
This issue spans Kaupapa Māori‑informed research, everyday teacher–child interactions, the construction of teacher identities, mentoring in field‑based programmes, the ethics of observation, and critical discourse analysis of assessment resources.
It is Difficult to Review the Quality of Education if You Don’t Know What Children are Learning: ERO and Self-Review of Early Childhood Services
A critical look at the New Zealand Education Review Office’s draft guidelines for reviewing early childhood services is provided in this paper. ERO’s guidelines provide a range of “evaluation indicators” to inform centres as to what is considered to be effective practice. The indicators that ERO provides in relation to the assessment of chi
What We Do
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