News & Opinion — ECE NZ

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.

ANALYSIS – October 16, 2025

Twenty one ECE services have had their licences downgraded for breaching regulations on four or more occasions in the last decade – and 33 services have spent more than a year on a provisional and/or suspended licence, an analysis by the Office of Early Childhood Education of nearly 10 years’ worth of data shows.

View the interactive tables with service names, see the patterns, and read the analysis to learn what is going on.

One service stands out on both lists.

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.

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

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.