Earthquake Drills

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Earthquake Drills and the Turtle Drop – Reflections and Discussion about what is Best Practice. By Warwick Marshall 

A big earthquake shakes while you’re in the kitchen at your house.  What do you do? 

Of course you throw yourself to the floor and drop like a turtle. Yeah right!  Adults are known to wait to see if an earthquake

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Half of ECE services rated “below the threshold for quality” by Education Review Office on at least one metric in the last year

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.

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Focus Group Methodology

Focus Group Methodology and its Usefulness in Early Childhood Research. By Claire McLachlan. Published in NZ Research in ECE Journal, 2005, pp. 113-123.

Abstract.

Focus groups are increasingly being used by researchers as a method of qualitative data gathering in educational contexts. The history of the focus group started with the ‘foc

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Values-based Interviewing as Part of the Staff Safety Check

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It is usual to conduct a formal interview with potential job applicants and to cover skills, experience and knowledge during the interview.  This ‘technical’ interview is important to ensure that the applicant has the skills, competencies and knowledge to meet the job description and person specifications.

F

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