Kidicorp's rejection of corporate profit-making is good news for quality ECE

27 March 2015

NZEI Te Riu Roa believes that Kidicorp’s decision to convert their early childhood education business into a non-profit charity is a positive development.

NZEI past president Judith Nowotarski said educators strongly agreed with Kidicorp co-founder Wayne Wright’s comments that commercially-driven operators would be focused on returns to shareholders rather than improving children’s lives.

“Early childhood education is no place for corporates to be squeezing out profit – kids won’t come first when shareholders are involved,” she said.

Kidicorp’s transformation into a charity coincides with an OIA report NZEI has just received from the Education Review Office, which clearly shows that non-profit ECE services are of better quality than for-profits.

The figures show that non-profit ECE centres are nearly twice as likely to receive the top ERO review as for-profit services. They are also nearly half as likely to receive a poor review.

Some 14% of non-profit services receive the top rating “Very Well Placed” (to promote positive learning outcomes for children), compared to 8% of for-profit services.

At the same time, for services reviewed in 2014, 8% of non-profits “required further development” compared to 13% of for-profit services.

For kindergartens, which employ only fully qualified teachers, 19% were “very well placed” and only 3% “required further development”.

Ms Nowotarski said the figures were all the more remarkable because a number of non-profit services have been purchased recently by corporates and will now be classified as for-profits, although their quality rating more likely reflects when they were non-profits.

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