Swings + Roundabouts Spring 2020

MESSAGE CEO's At the time of writing we’ve been coping with elevated COVID-19 levels and all that brings for our teams, communities and your centres once more. When we were packing into rugby grounds, the beaches and planes again, you’d be forgiven for thinking COVID-19 was ‘behind us’. But the return of the virus and Levels 2 and 3 have been a stark reminder that we’re not out of the woods and need to stay vigilant and adaptable. Early learning was already facing plenty of challenges pre-pandemic – we should be preparing for them to get tougher. Whether it’s attracting children back whose parents have lost their job and are making decisions about fees, or those nervous about their whānau’s health, the problems are plain to see. So what should we do? To me, we need to focus on what we can control. Working hard to provide safe environments for our children and keeping the lines of communication open with their parents and our teams is more important now than ever. We play a vital role in getting the economy moving by enabling parents to get back to work, not to mention our core role of educating and caring for the next generation. Long term, our big focus in the ECC is pushing for the ECE funding review to be completed. Fixing the broken funding model is well overdue, for your centres and the whole sector. Why the review? We start with the child. Almost every decision in ECE is focused on maintaining a delicate funding balancing act that leads to nonsensical decisions and drivers. It takes our resources and energy away from where it should be focused, on the children we’re teaching. It’s at the point now where ECE has finally received a very welcome funding increase, it’s unclear where it’s going, and in some cases created new problems. I think most people would agree it’s a pretty sad state of affairs where good things happen, but it leaves everyone confused! Some of the issues we’ve addressed recently include the return of the 100% funding band and the hurdles to achieve it without having to dip further into already depleted pockets to maintain it. The situation where teacher pay increases weren’t always matched with a commiserate subsidy increase. And the frustration we feel that even with the increases, come January, kindergarten corporations will still be receiving 16.44% more funding than centres, even though we’re all doing the same job! We’ve also pushed hard on behalf of centres with teachers already payed above the minimum rate being able to use those funds for other well-overdue needs like deferred maintenance or education resources, which we’ve had confirmed by the Minister. We even released our own draft Terms of Reference for a future funding review, to move the conversation along and share what’s possible. It’s recommended reading, you can find it on our website. With the general election coming up, we’ve been searching for ECE-specific policy, and mostly come up short. On pages 10 and 11 you’ll find a table of what’s available at the time of going to press. We encourage everyone with a stake in early learning to read it, do your own research, and contact your local officials and candidates to ask them where they stand. We hope that most of the yawning gaps will be filled between now and voting and have called on all parties to release ECE policy so you can make an informed decision in the booth. Of course, we understand the pandemic response is dominating most aspects of politics and government. But to protect and grow a strong early learning sector, that contributes so much to our children and community’s livelihoods, we need a confident plan for the future that enables you to plan for the success of your centre and team. Show us the policy! Stay safe, go well. Peter, ECC CEO September 2020 { 8 }