MESSAGE CEO's We will continue to publish Swings & Roundabouts once yearly, so a hard copy magazine will grace your finger-tips again in the future but not as frequently. In my March interview with Kathryn Ryan on Nine-to-Noon, I highlighted what it is like for early childhood centre managers, owners and the teaching teams when the Ministry of Education visits them. How perilous those visits can be and how much power the Ministry holds over them through their ability to reclassify licences, that’s the mechanism they use to shut down centres. Since March ECC has had to represent multiple members who are faced by Ministry licensing reclassifications, which ECC considers are unreasonable. A report has been released publicly by the Ministry listing all the centres they have interfered with and how much funding those centres would have lost. The total is so eye-watering that the Ministry has withheld the funding information from the public. They argue it’s not in the public interest you to know how much money these ECE providers lost. ECC disagrees strongly and considers it shameful that they will release financial information of centres when it suits them but not when it doesn’t. Keeping the losses secret is hard to justify. You can read the Ministry’s report online at https://tinyurl.com/bdc3y458 A centre licence suspension comes with immediate, irreversible financial consequences. No funding can be claimed for the duration of the suspension. A suspension can be a killer blow for a business because the government funding can represent over 80% of the required revenue to meet costs in some cases. To put this in simpler terms: when the licence is suspended the employer still has to pay the salaries for the teachers but they are not the money they used to. How long operates can afford to keep going depends on financial reserves and their resilience – which I can tell you now is not looking strong across the ECE sector, with over 400 centres closed since March 2023. Some of the reasons for suspensions are issues with safety checking compliance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a case of the Ministry closing a state school because the school failed to do the safety checking process properly. The same regulations apply to both schools and ECEs. But why does a mistake in the ECE setting get treated so harshly? ECC does not think it is efficient to close ECE centres due to administrative mistakes alone. If an ECE failed to safety check someone who was a real risk – then that would be a different story. There is no data showing that the safety checking regime is actually identifying any risky individuals at all. Yet if you don’t do the process right, ECEs can expect to be suspended. Suspension is on the road to centre closure, in my book. This is the last quarterly issue of Swings & Roundabouts as ECC shifts its emphasis to getting centre managers and their people more regular news through our email-based newsletters each month. Get yourself on the list – sign up here. July 2024 { 8 }
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