ECE quantity targets are meaningless without funding

ECE quantity targets are meaningless without funding for quality

18 March 2016

News that the Wellington region has hit the government’s early childhood education participation target is cold comfort to educators, says NZEI Te Riu Roa.

NZEI National Secretary Paul Goulter said the government’s obsession with quantitative targets ignored the importance of a quality learning environment in early childhood education services.

“Having 98 percent of pre-schoolers enrolled in ECE is meaningless if centres are not adequately funded to provide qualified teaching staff, good adult-to-child ratios and small group sizes. Otherwise, it’s just crowd control and the children are getting little out of it,” he said.

The government used to fund centres up to 100% of qualified teachers, but reduced that to 80% in 2010. Since then, services committed to 100% quality teaching have been scrambling to meet the shortfall, but they are finding it unsustainable without proper funding.

The operational funding for all ECE services has also been frozen, which impacts all services, regardless of their proportion of qualified teachers.

The only additional ECE funding in the past five years has been for increased participation, with no extra to cover inflation or other growing costs.

The lost funding means that many ECE services are struggling. Late last year, Whānau Manaaki Kindergartens (previously Wellington Kindergarten Association) announced a range of cost-cutting measures. Teachers now have less planning and assessment time and have had their hours of work reduced.

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