ECE Newsroom Restricted

The ECE sector has delivered an unexpected bright spot in an otherwise difficult year for New Zealand businesses, recording its lowest number of service closures in recent years.

The figures come after warnings from some provider groups and lobbyists that the 0.5% funding increase announced in Budget 2025 would fall far short of rising costs and lead to widespread closures. In October 2025, claims circulated that as many as 400 centres could shut within a year. However, The Post recently reported comments from Associate Education Minister David Seymour noting that this was not the first time he had been warned of “real doom and gloom,” and that such predictions “have not come true in the past.” The latest data appears to support that view.

LOG IN for the full data, trends, and what they reveal about the sector’s resilience.

This stability stands in stark contrast to the wider economy. Across the country, 2025 recorded the highest number of business closures in more than a decade, with many sectors hit hard by rising costs and tightening margins. Despite these pressures, the ECE sector remained comparatively insulated.

New Zealand’s new Director of Regulation (ECE) position remains without a permanent appointee, even though legislation requires the role to be in place from 23 February 2026.

The Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill, passed on 26 November 2025, created the Director of Regulation as an independent statutory position.

Children in early childhood education services have no legal protection against exposure to excessive heat, even though minimum indoor temperatures have long been regulated.

Current rules require indoor rooms to remain above 18°C, but the Office of Early Childhood Education has received reports of children experiencing discomfort and distress during periods of high summer temperatures.

A recent review of ECE regulations has confirmed that minimum indoor temperature requirements will remain in place, but no corresponding maximum temperature limit will be introduced.

OPINION/ANALYSIS – October 23, 2025

The Education Review Office considers more than half of 394 early childhood services it has visited in the last year to be “below the threshold for quality” on at least one of its four metrics.

In September 2024, ERO started using a new rating system for its quality assurance reports for ECE.

How did your service do? View our our interactive table and read full details.

The Office of Early Childhood Education’s chief advisor Dr Sarah Alexander says because ERO gives ECE services four weeks’ notice of reviews, it was concerning that so many services were still not measuring up to quality standards.

Moreover, because the Education Review Office no longer has the capacity or resources to review every licensed service it now assesses only a small selection from providers that operate 14 or more services. As a result, we have no way of knowing how many of these services fall below ERO’s threshold for quality.

Associate education minister David Seymour has responded to concerns from the Office of Early Childhood Education about claims circulating in the sector that the pay parity scheme is causing more education and care centres to close.

In August, we fact checked claims by some ECE business lobbyists that the initiative was “directly contributing to the decline in service numbers”. We analysed data on openings and closures of services from 2022 to 2024 and found no evidence this was happening.

We also looked at what else was happening at the time such as the Covid pandemic (vaccination requirements for most businesses weren’t removed until 4/4/2022). We noted the rise in qualified teachers – in 2021, 65.5% of staff at these services were qualified teachers, compared to 67% in 2024. In 2025 more than 90% of eligible centres have opted-in to some form of pay parity.

Despite this, in a Cabinet paper from April, the Ministry of Education wrote to Seymour that “Sector representatives such as the Early Childhood Council have indicated that pay parity arrangements are creating funding shortfalls for centres, increasing rates of closure”.

Worried about how this myth was being perpetuated, the OECE wrote to Seymour and the Ministry to let them know about our findings.

OPINION/ANALYSIS – October 2, 2025

A gas leak from a fridge at an Auckland early childhood centre resulted in three teachers being taken to hospital.

The incident, which occurred on October 14, 2024 at an Auckland early childhood centre, was widely reported by mainstream media at the time.

But how it happened has never been publicly revealed until now.

This article looks at what happened, the Ministry of Education and Worksafe findings, and questions why teachers were cleaning a fridge, adult-child ratios, and what training the teachers had been given on fridge cleaning to prevent such an incident.

The Ministry of Education does not hold records of the early childhood centres on public land.

This means that there is no way of tracking which ECE centres could be at risk of eviction or closure if the school or council they are renting the land from decides not to renew their lease.

The problem was exposed recently when Longbeach Playcentre, near Ashburton, was informed by its landlord Longbeach School that from the end of the year it would not be able to continue operating in the building it has been based in for 20 years.

After news of the situation broke, the Office of Early Childhood Education asked the Ministry for the names of ECE services located on public land, including hospitals, tertiary institutes and public reserves, as well as schools.

Health and safety in ECE: What Worksafe and Ministry documents reveal about four serious harm incidents

ANALYSIS/OPINION – 5 September 2025

A child temporarily lost consciousness and was taken to hospital in an ambulance after choking while eating at an Auckland early childhood centre.

Details of the incident are being made public for th

Fewer than half of ECE centres that are eligible for the Government’s free lunch programme have been getting the kai in the early months of the programme, official reports indicate.

A child’s neck became wedged in a fence and their breathing was restricted after they fell off a bike while attending early childhood education.

The injury was one of 244 serious incidents that ECE services notified to national health and safety regulator.

More than half of the injuries involved trips, slips or falls, the Office of Early Childhood Education’s analysis of the data, which we obtained under the Official Information Act, found.

What is a notifiable injury or illness? From the WorkSafe Website: All injuries or illnesses that require (or would usually require) a person to be admitted to hospital for immediate treatment are notifiable. A notifiable incident is an unplanned or uncontrolled work-related incident that exposes the health and safety of workers or others to a serious risk arising from immediate or imminent exposure to such dangers as a gas leak or explosion. A notifiable event is any of the following work-related events: a death, a notifiable injury or illness or a notifiable incident.

Incidents included:
– A child being given food they were allergic to.
– A child eating laundry powder after following a staff member into the laundry room.
– A child sliding down a piece of play equipment with a plastic tube in their mouth, leading to the tube hitting the back of their throat “with force” as they hit the ground. 

A free kindergarten association plans to make all of its kindergartens open year-round from the beginning of 2026, the Office of Early Childhood Education understands.

Multiple sources have told the OECE that the association’s management team has informed teachers employed by the kindergarten association, one of the largest ECE service providers in New Zealand, of the proposal, but parents and families have not yet been told.  

The move to year-round care and education may prove popular with parents in paid employment.

No public announcements have been made yet, so the OECE has chosen not to name the kindergarten association at this stage.

The Office of Early Childhood Education has compared how our submission, and that of the ECC, compared with the Ministry for Regulation’s final conclusions related to the review of licensing criteria and certain regulations for the sector.

This includes:
> all licensing criteria
> teacher qualification
> pay parity salary attestation
> person responsible
> door handle height
> MoE complaints process and visits.

We found that the Ministry’s recommendations lined up with those of the ECC for 55 of the 98 criteria/regulations.

We’ve put together the below searchable table so that you can compare the recommendations each party made.

After RNZ revealed last Friday that the Government intends to axe the pay parity scheme for education and care teachers, in part to give providers “greater autonomy… to negotiate” with teachers about pay, the Office of Early Childhood Education has been fact checking claims by ECE business lobbyists that pay parity has caused more services to close.

In our view, there is no evidence of this, based on the available statistics.

In a Cabinet paper from April, which was publicly released on July 17, the Ministry of Education wrote to associate minister of education David Seymour that: “The options in this paper begin the process of proactively moving away from the opt-in pay parity system and providing greater autonomy to providers to negotiate with teachers on matters of pay. The wider funding review you are seeking Cabinet approval for provides the opportunity to complete this process”.

On average, ECE teachers or staff members are off work for three to four months after sustaining a work related injury, ACC data indicates.

Two weeks ago, the Office of Early Childhood Education revealed that annually ACC accepts around 10,000 claims per year for injuries to children and staff at early childhood services. In total, the claims cost between $8 million and $9 million per year.

We have now obtained more statistics.