I think something needs to be fixed in the way we are thinking about early childhood education in New Zealand. In January, the Government announced that schools would receive 5,000 portable air cleaners, and that on top of this, there would be 2,500 CO2 monitors so schools can test the ventilation of classrooms. The Ministry of Education issued guidance for schools that is critically important right now because ventilation is one of the key public health measures deployed to manage COVID-19. It gets increasingly more important with the cooler months approaching. In fact, out of the seven public health measures that apply in all early childhood centres – improving ventilation probably has the most potential to help reduce the spread of Omicron in your centres. I’ll explain the other six measures briefly first, as this is somewhat relative. Vaccination: in early childhood, what many regards as the top public health measure – vaccination - is not yet readily available: all 150,000 children enrolled in early childhood centres are unvaccinated. Yes, early childhood teachers are required to be vaccinated if they are on site. At the ECC we have heard from many of our members about the teachers they lost who would sooner leave the profession than get vaccinated. It is painful for centre managers to lose their staff, more so as we are in a sustained teacher supply crisis. “Good”, one public health expert said to me when I told them about what I felt was a surprisingly high loss of early childhood teachers in our sector. Their view was we don’t need teachers with anti-vaccination beliefs teaching our youngest children. “Stay home, if you are sick (and get tested)” is the next measure. In the early childhood context, you need to think about this one. It’s quite different for teachers, relieving teachers and managers who have their sense of professional duty. Compare that sense of duty to what it must be like for young children themselves – who, let’s face it, ordinarily get runny noses, sore tummies and coughs. ECC gets regular questions from centre managers about this – and we remind them that unless there has been a test or the GP has advised it is safe, they need to treat all COVID symptoms as potentially COVID. No complacency. But I think you get the point. This measure is pretty weak in the scheme of things in an early learning centre. Some people (adults/children) have few visible symptoms, but they can still be sick. Even between men and women, we can observe some stark differences. In terms of assessments of sickness, for example. They are subjective assessments that we make MESSAGE CEO's ECC ran surveys from October 2021 up until recently in Jan 2022 – and the trend of centres losing teachers has remained steady. Even with the booster. But this is all relative. I think what’s happened in early learning is substantial because roughly 40% of members surveyed lost one or more teacher (many lost significantly more). Whereas the publicly accepted schooling statistic was in the region of 1-2% of all schoolteachers. That doesn’t sound like nearly as many. Hold on a minute. Perhaps there is devil in the detail: estimates of total teachers in compulsory schooling are in the region of 70,000. So, 2% would be 700-1,400 schoolteachers. That’s still a lot of teachers! Government should maintain the register of all teachers including unqualified teachers. Without this information we just have surveys and estimates. March 2022 { 8 }
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