Spot Checks: Protecting Safety and Standards
This opinion article is published as part of our ‘Speaking-up‘ series
By Bonnie Te Ara Henare.
11 December 2024.
I think anyone who says there is over-auditing and too many regulations in ECE within New Zealand have got to be joking! Or you are not professionally connected to how ECE is regulated globally, or you do know the quality standards that produce safe, secure and healthy early childhood settings where high quality education and care are cultivated for our most vulnerable citizens.
One example of this can be found with our neighbouring colleagues, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Whilst working as a Centre Director there, it was not unusual to get unannounced inspections from authorised officers. The NSW Department of Education contacted us between two to four times in an operational year, undertaking partial or full regulatory checks for compliance either face to face or by phone and email.
On their site visits, they just popped in. You didn’t know they were coming. If there’s someone coming to the door with a clipboard in hand, you knew that they were coming from the Department of Education to do a check. You were given 10-15 minutes to collect all the documentation for them to check.
They checked the qualifications, ratios, supervision, every aspect of health and safety, and so on. They looked at everything from height measurements of windows in playrooms, sleeping charts with 3-5 min regular checks completed for sight, hearing and touch of babies and their sleep monitoring. And if the centre can’t produce the evidence or show its meeting requirements, they sent a breach notice. The centre gets just 24 hours to respond in writing and comply.
At first, as a New Zealand trained teacher, I couldn’t believe the rigorous way that they undertook their regulatory compliance checks. But I gradually begun to anticipate these visits as opportunities to demonstrate a level of competency in centre preparedness – it was like building a compliance muscle that became second nature. The unannounced spot checks kept our team as a centre on top of it, we celebrated the visits as a challenge to conquer.
You just couldn’t afford to let the high standards we developed slip. You’ve always got your eye on things every day because you just don’t know if someone from the Dept of Education will arrive at your door. There are heavy penalties and enforcement on the Centre manager or Person Responsible, of up to $9,100 in fines or up to $45,900.00 for other offences relating to non-compliance.
As a centre manager, you are accountable and responsible for making sure you are compliant everyday and all day; and my employer was like, yeah, unfortunately, that’s your responsibility, if you have not fulfilled your duties you are penalised not the organisation. It was highly motivating.
We became ‘fit’ for review and we didn’t fear the spot checks – there will always be a healthy measure of anxiousness but it is always rewarding when you got to demonstrate what you are doing and we received positive affirmation about our centre and staff.
The system there keeps you on your toes, and that’s a good thing for you as a manager and approved service providers. Personally, after a couple of years of building a more compliant muscle, I experienced peace of mind as a manager, even if one of our leadership team stepped up in my absence, I knew our team leaders were trained to comply and adhere to the regulations that keep us professionally safe.
In contrast our system in NZ has made us far too cavalier. Using the metaphor of building muscle, I would say weakened our responsiveness to the history and purpose of the regulations and the legislation that brought them into our services. Our sector has suffered much loss due to serious incidents, injuries, and death of our children , we cannot be dismissive of the regulatory intent to keep us safe when working with children.
Centres here can be operating for years and never receive a check from the Ministry. There is no spot checking due to the Ministry of Education operating from a high trust model, giving teachers, professional leaders, approved service providers and persons responsible the autonomy to act accordingly with the law, standards and regulations that support active supervision and child protection through robust health and safety procedures. The Ministry of Education only intercedes when required to inspect a service when it receives a complaint or a serious incident warrants it.
In my professional capacity, I have been in many centres providing education and professional support service. The things I’ve seen have caused deep concern for me, I would even be as bold to say it has shaken me to the core. Some centres are demonstrating a negligent, dismissive manner in regards to complying with basic health and safety measures, especially around supervision and ratios, justifying their minimal commitment to responsive care.
We need to be a demand on service providers, authorities and regulators to do more to ensure the safety of children, to be a demand on the sector to lift their game, be fit for purpose, and not sell out on our nation’s children, we cannot just be content to meet the minimum requirements but we owe it to our children and their families to exceed them, that is what I would want for my own children.
We must show a commitment to the principle of continuous improvement and good reasoning in the regulatory review process and the system that governs and monitors quality in ECE within NZ.
De-regulating or diminishing the power of the current regulations is not the right beginning step to making improvement – we need to build upon it, expand it, exercise it and produce the evidence that sustains the quality of its implementation.
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Further learning
Watch this presentation by Associate Professor Wendy Boyd on what it takes to achieve quality ECE, including the role of regulation and spot-checks.
