The Ministry of Education is planning a series of rule changes that will make it easier to crack down on poor-quality early childhood centres.
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Ministerial documents said the overhaul was needed in part because of a rising number of complaints about centres and a growing number of challenges when the ministry tried to act.
They also warned the pandemic could cause financial difficulties for some services, "potentially leading to decisions that do not support quality outcomes for children".
The documents said the first round of changes would target problems that potentially put children's health and safety at risk.
They included allowing the ministry to issue directions to early learning services without first initiating a formal review of their licence, and allowing it to shut down those that had repeatedly been on provisional licences.
The documents said there was currently no restriction on the number of times an early learning service could be placed on a provisional licence.
"This means services can cycle on and off provisional licences for regulatory breaches, even repeated breaches of the same regulation, as long as they meet the licence conditions within the required timeframes," the document said.
"This type of 'cycling' demonstrates that a service is unable to sustain compliance with the regulations and could be putting the health and safety of children at risk. It is of particular concern when a service is frequently on a provisional licence for the same type of breaches and unable to embed practices that ensure continued compliance."
The chief executive of early childhood research and advocacy organisation, Child Forum, Sarah Alexander, said the proposed changes were small, but important.
"The ministry should be able to cancel the licence of an early childhood service based on its past history. That would be a good thing if it reduces the number of services that cut corners and that put children's safety at risk," she said.
She said some centres on provisional licences had the ability to improve, but others did not and the ministry should consider the competence of the people running a service when making its decisions.
She said low-quality was a lot more common than official figures indicated.
"There are probably many more services breaching minimum standards because they know they can get away with it than are on the official record," she said.
The head of the Teacher Advocacy Group, a support group for early childhood teachers, Susan Bate, said the ministry should hurry up and change the rules, particularly around provisional licences.
"The thing that we really need to look at is the ability of the ministry to cancel licences for centres that have been endlessly on provisional licence," she said.
"I don't think that should even be up for discussion, I think that should have been dealt with a long time ago - just do it," she said.
The documents said further changes would be made in 2022 and 2023.
Early childhood researcher Mike Bedford said he hoped the next round of changes would include much better ratios of teachers to children.
"We need an improvement on teacher: child ratios absolutely as soon as we can get it, it's the number one priority, because the ratios at the moment are a cause of stress right the way through the sector," he said.
Meanwhile, the chief executive of the Early Childhood Council, Peter Reynolds, said centre owners would like some changes too.
For example, some licences required new early learning centres to have their full complement of teachers from the first day they opened.
"If you're licensed for say 50 children, but you've only got 10 from the day you open your doors, it seems rather dopey to us to need 50 children's worth of staff from day one," he said.
