News & Opinion — ECE NZ

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.

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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.