2025 in review: News (and views) from the Office of Early Childhood Education over the past year
OPINION/ANNUAL REVIEW – 20 January 2026
If we had to sum up what last year (2025) had in store for our ECE sector in one word, it would be “flux”.
The sector has experienced rapid and significant change over the past 12 months, and there is still considerable uncertainty about what comes next. With an election approaching, the policy environment may shift again as parties refine their positions, and these dynamics could shape both the direction of policy and the pace of changes already underway.
Parents have also stepped forward, launching a petition calling for a stronger focus on improving quality in ECE. You can add your name to it here: https://our.actionstation.org.nz/p/put-children-first
To keep our members (teachers and service providers) updated on everything they’ve needed to know about what’s going on in the sector, the Office of Early Childhood Education launched a newsroom, through which we’ve published articles regularly (usually weekly). We’ve also opened newsroom access to non‑member readers via a subscription.
Here, we sum up the major stories we’ve covered in the past year – in case you missed them or you’re keen to take a second look.
We put health and safety under the microscope
Over the past year, we’ve published a series of stories about how both Worksafe and the Ministry of Education have responded to recent health and safety incidents at ECE services.
Our investigations have revealed that:
- Health and safety incidents made up the majority of serious incidents reported to the Ministry of Education
- The cost of injuries sustained by children and adults in ECE totals between $8 million and $9 million every year (according to ACC)
- On average, people who work in ECE spend around three to four months recovering from work-related injuries
- Worksafe did not investigate a single health and safety incident involving a child in two years, despite receiving more than 200 notifications of these kinds of incidents
We also analysed summaries of more than 200 reports to Worksafe to look for trends and bring to light more details about serious incidents that had remained in the shadows.
Then, we dug deeper, looking into some of these incidents in greater detail by combing through the Worksafe files on these reports. These incidents included two incidents of choking (including one where a child was served food considered to be “high risk”).
In the hope that it might help save other children and support ECE services with insights to support best practices, we covered in-depth two Coroner’s reports about deaths that have occurred as a result of incidents in ECE settings – that of a 20-month-old who died from a fall and a 5-month-old boy who died while napping in a cot at a centre.
We also told the full story, for the first time, of how the investigation into a toddler’s brain injury after a fall onto concrete at a centre was handled by authorities – and his parents’ ongoing quest for answers and accountability.
Media had previously reported a “gas leak” at an Auckland centre in 2024 that resulted in three teachers being taken to hospital. We investigated what actually happened. The circumstances raises questions about whether training in commercial cleaning was provided and should teachers be cleaning while responsible for children?
In November 2025, a major safety incident occurred that was widely reported in the media: seven people, including five children, were hospitalised with chemical burns after a corrosive substance was poured down a slide at a centre. We noted that the Ministry did not carry out a full licence check after the incident and before the centre reopened to children. The centre had previously had its licence temporarily downgraded to provisional in 2023 for breaching premises and facilities requirements.
We’ve advocated for the retention of regulations that protect children
We believe regulations exist to protect infants, toddlers, and young children, and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the people teaching and caring for them.
That’s why we submitted to the Ministry of Education to raise several concerns about the recommendations made in the Ministry for Regulation’s review to remove and/or change many licensing criteria, and made our full submission publicly available. We also provided the Ministry with detailed analysis of the draft Education (Early Childhood Services) Amendment Regulations 2025, which propose a softer more graduated toolkit for managing compliance risk in ECE services, as well as changes that would lower qualification requirements for teachers.
In addition, we made a submission to Parliament’s Education and Workforce Committee on the ECE Reform Bill, outlining how several of the proposed changes risked backfiring and harming the very people they were intended to support.
We also spoke to children’s rights advocates to get their views on the policy changes
- Interview with Dr Sarah Te One, independent ECE researcher and member of the Children’s Rights Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand (CRAANZ) Steering Committee
- Interview with Dr Mary Maloney, international expert
Analysing how our feedback on the regulatory review differed from that of a major ECE business lobby group showed that the review placated the interests of these lobbyists.
Our investigation into the compliance record of the centre where the associate minister announced the regulations review showed that it had previously fallen foul of regulations. This brought up obvious questions about why Minister Seymour chose this location for the announcement.
Following our report on the death of a 5-month-old boy in a cot at an Auckland centre, the Government backed away from its plan to change the licence criterion for sleep checks and is no longer planning to extend the maximum time a child can be left unsupervised and unchecked from 10 to 15 minutes. While there were some other reversals of proposed changes that our analysis found would undermine child safety and quality of ECE, our explainer on the new licensing criteria (which take effect in April 2026) shows that, overall, the proposals amount to a softening – not a strengthening – of requirements.
We tracked the progress of the ECE free lunch programme
As the ECE free lunch programme got underway, we followed its progress.
First, we reported why the Government’s contract with the provider KidsCan had come under scrutiny by the Auditor General.
Then, we caught out David Seymour misleading the public, by exposing that 20% of centres that were participating in the programme were privately owned, even though he’d repeatedly said that only community-based services would qualify.
We also conducted an analysis that showed that fewer than half of eligible centres were actually receiving food as part of the programme.
We highlighted the realities of working conditions in the sector
Throughout the year there were several legislative and policy changes that impacted the ECE workforce. We’ve covered all of these announcements and analysed the changes, including the scrapping of the teachers’ pay equity claim, in depth.
We kept a close eye on how many care and education centres had opted into full pay parity in recent funding rounds, and dispelled the myth purported by some business lobbyists that pay parity was causing more centres to close.
We also tracked how the proportion of the ECE qualified workforce who were on work visas had increased.
We weighed in on how ECE could be made more affordable
After David Seymour said the 20 hours ECE policy would not be part of the funding review because it was working well, we analysed how it was being implemented at 10 centres across the South Island.
We found that there was a huge variation in the conditions services put in place for families to access the 20 hours (some forcing them to enrol for at least 21 hours and then clipping the ticket for unfunded hour(s), others offering families four five hour sessions completely free, others charging for food but not hours of care/education). We questioned whether this was evidence that the policy was working well, as Seymour claimed.
When the Government tweaked the Family Boost policy, to increase the rebates parents can receive and the income threshold, we commented on the changes, saying that while the changes would be welcomed by higher‑income households, they would do little to address inequality
We found policy and regulation was not always ensuring safe, high-quality education was delivered to children
The results of our annual ECE confidence survey in May showed that the vast majority of respondents believed the Government was taking the sector in the wrong direction.
We revealed that ministerial intervention had been sought in a case where an ECE service was suspended over problems with staff safety checks. We also reported that Minister Seymour became involved in advocating for a centre to remain open, despite the Ministry’s intention to close it due to licence breaches and concerns that improvements could not be sustained because of heavy reliance on temporary staff.
Every year the Office of Early Childhood Education makes available a list of ECE services that, at any point during the year, were operating on a downgraded licence or permanently shut down due to non-compliance. We reported on the data for the 2024 year, showing there had been a significant drop from the year before in the number of services whose licence had been downgraded, and we questioned what was behind this drop when there had been no major reduction in licensing requirements (yet) that could explain the drop
To understand the national picture, we sought broader data. Information obtained under the Official Information Act revealed that the Education Review Office considered more than half of the early childhood services it visited in the past year to be “below the threshold for quality” on at least one of its four metrics.
We also examined nearly 10 years of data on services that had their licences changed due to breaches of minimum standards. Several services had their licences downgraded four or more times, and some spent more than a year on provisional or suspended licences. We questioned why the Ministry does not have a clear policy on how many times a service can be placed on a provisional licence before its licence is cancelled.
The Ministry finally agreed to provide data on complaints, which we analysed and found that the ministry did not uphold the majority of complaints. Because the content of the complaints has not been made public, many questions remain – though a report on parent complaints made through My ECE in 2024 provides some clues.
We held power to account and fact checked politicians’ claims
What politicians say has sway. So when they make generalised statements about what is happening in the ECE they have the power to shape opinions on the sector.
That’s why we’ve committed to following up and checking the veracity of various comments political leaders have made this year about ECE.
For example, after David Seymour repeatedly referenced an anecdote about how the Ministry of Education apparently requested that a centre operator near a rail line write to KiwiRail to ask its train drivers to stop honking their honks as they passed the centre because the Ministry considered the noise to be a health and safety issue, we looked into how this story surfaced.
We discovered the situation wasn’t quite as straight forward as Seymour had been portraying it to be.
When we noticed references in Ministry documents to claims by business lobbyists that pay parity had led to ECE centres closing because the policy was too expensive for them to implement, we dug deeper into publicly available data to assess whether this was true. Our analysis found no evidence that this was happening, so we wrote to both the Ministry and associate minister Seymour to correct the record.
Minister of Education Erica Stanford also alleged that an increasing number of children were starting school without being toilet trained. This claim was difficult to fact check. However, it got us thinking, if it’s true, then why is the National-led Government introducing policies that will make the problem worse (as we outlined in an op-ed story)?
We showcased annual statistics in new ways
We aim to update the sector on important movings and shakings every year.
This year we decided to approach some of our annual articles differently.
We wanted to make them more easily digestible for busy members, so we wrote about the top funded ECE service providers, openings and closures of services and ECE ownership changes is a more news-y style and illustrated each of these stories with interactive charts which we shared on our social media platforms.
Wrapping Up and Hearing From You
That’s a wrap on our overview of the major stories from the OECE in 2025.
What were the stories we covered last year that resonated with you the most, or that you thought had the biggest impact or were most important?
What stories do you want us to cover in 2026? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.
