Keynote address to Australian Schools Education & Early Childhood Congres

E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga hau e wha.Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

Warm greetings all of you - from government, schools and business in the language of the tangata whenua of my country and can I acknowledge the indigenous people of your land.

I am delighted to be here with you all today as New Zealand’s Minister of Education, and very pleased to be able to talk to you about early childhood education for children in New Zealand.

I know Australia and New Zealand face similar challenges. The world is changing. More Parents are working, and for longer hours. We know more about the benefits of quality early childhood services preparing children for school and learning, and the demands for culturally responsive early childhood services are increasing. 

Today, I want to particularly focus on how we are overcoming barriers to participation.  In terms of the big picture, Australia and New Zealand both have diverse sectors. We have a range of service types and we have multicultural and indigenous populations participating in our services. We have both seen strong growth in recent years.

Other similarities include strong participation in early childhood education prior to starting school and we both have a focus on providing families with high quality, accessible, affordable integrated early childhood education. All this is useful when it comes to thinking through whether issues we share can benefit from approaches used by each country.

Let me take a few minutes to provide some background for those who need to put what I am saying into context. Our Government supports services through funding and regulations - our current expenditure on early childhood is approximately 0.6 percent of New Zealand’s GDP.

No service is owned or operated by the Government. Our role is in ensuring there are enough choices. We have teacher-led services such as Kindergartens – private and community-owned services, Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Education and Care services and Home-based services.

We have parent-led models such as Playcentres, Playgroups. And we also have centres that use a Māori language immersion model, Kōhanga Reo and Pasifika Language nests. Providing choice is part of increasing participation in education. It enables us to respond to wider population shifts, such as increased enrolments in all-day services attributed to an increase in the number of employed parents.  As Minister of Education, I work with my Ministry. I also have direct contact with umbrella organisations. We have three main kinds of umbrella organisations – private ones, such as Kiddicorp or Kindercare, community-based ones such as Kōhango Reo and the Playcentre Association, and umbrella organisations such as Barnados and PORSE that coordinate home-based care.

Children who attend a quality early childhood education service gain benefits that last through to their early years of school and beyond.  We don’t know how many hours a day of early childhood education makes this difference for an individual child, but we do know that children who attend regularly in their early years show higher cognitive skills and more advanced social skills.

New Zealand researcher, Dr Anne Meade, in her 2001 paper, “Early Learning and the Brain”, notes how a child’s experience shapes the brain itself. Imaging techniques now make it possible to see the impact of the effects of a child’s experiences on the development of the brain.  There is a visible foundation for future learning and behaviour.

Our latest New Zealand research has confirmed that early childhood education leads to positive outcomes for children and that there are benefits in mathematics, reading, and general school performance.

Internationally, research shows that children who receive early childhood education, are less likely to repeat a year of schooling and less likely to need intervention through our special education interventions. These improvements are not just short-term. The benefits from early gains in literacy and numeracy continue throughout a child’s schooling and life.

New Zealand has among the highest rates of early childhood education participation in the world. A recent UNICEF report showed New Zealand had one of the highest participation rates for 4 year olds in the OECD. The New Zealand participation rate for under three year olds is 32 per cent – that’s eight per cent higher than the OECD participation average.

Overall, New Zealand is doing well in terms of participation.

• In 2008, 95 percent of New Zealand children had experienced some form of early childhood education in the year before they started school. That’s an increase of three percentage points over the last six years.


• There are greater increases within some age groups - the rate of increase is greatest for children aged one, two, and three years.

Despite these good figures, our top priority is still increasing participation. There are so many benefits for children of early childhood education that we want all children to share these - especially those children who can most benefit from participation.  One of the most important research findings for us, is that quality early childhood education has the greatest benefits for children of low socio-economic backgrounds. Yet it is these children who, historically, have been the least likely to participate in it.

More recently, our data show that children with the greatest increase in participation is from children in lower socio-economic groups, Māori and Pasifika communities.

This is not cause for complacency, since these communities still have lower levels of participation.

• In 2008, 98% of European children, 90% of Māori children and 85% of Pasifika children had attended early childhood education by the time they began school.


• There are also variations across geographical areas. For example, if you are a Māori in South Auckland, you are just over 11 per cent less likely than Māori elsewhere in New Zealand to have attended early childhood education. We need to do better at increasing attendance in those areas that are below our national average.


• There is still evidence that children who begin school in a lower socio-economic area are less likely to have participated in early childhood education. In 2008, only 86 per cent of children from lower socio-economic areas attended early childhood education, compared to 99 per cent from higher socio-economic areas.

Our country’s rapidly accelerating birth rate has put pressure on capacity and teacher supply – particularly in early childhood education. This ‘baby boom' is not evenly spread – either ethnically or geographically as there are higher levels of population growth in Māori and Pasifika populations and their rates of attendance vary geographically.

My Government is working to improve participation for all and major responses to meeting this challenge include:

• valuing families


• setting high standards


• and building opportunity.

I have asked my Ministry to prioritise improvements to policy and operations that improve participation.

This work will particularly focus on:

• increasing the participation of Māori and Pasifika children


• increasing the participation of children from low socio-economic backgrounds


• recognising the significance of language and culture


• enhancing links with other early intervention services. 

We want all children to have the benefit of early childhood education - and to be able to participate in early childhood education, we have to ensure that children have access to services. Although the number of licensed services increased nearly nine per cent [8.6%] between 2004 and 2008, to keep pace with population growth, this is not the only response required. Services are accessible when they are close to home or convenient for the family, acceptable to the parents in terms of philosophy and culture, and of course, affordable. In terms of access, most areas in New Zealand do have a service that can take on new enrolments. However, waiting lists can be longer than six months, and large families may not be able to get all of their children into one service.

Closeness to home is a significant factor – and it is even more significant for refugees, migrants, and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds in terms of transport.

We also increase our participation in New Zealand through working directly with communities to ensure participation. For example, when Ministry of Education regional staff work closely with refugee and migrant communities to raise awareness of the importance of early childhood education, this leads to children attending early childhood education or setting up their own community-led early childhood education. The Ministry provides support to communities and the Government provides funding to cover the costs of rent and equipment.

Both the support and the flexibility of playgroups as a model contribute to their popularity. In Auckland, refugee and migrant playgroups cover a number of different ethnicities, including: Pasifika, pan-ethnic Muslim, Japanese, Chinese, Tamil, Burundi, Congolese and Somali. These groups run on the ‘language nest’ model to support language and culture. Language nests refer to early childhood education and care based on a specific language or culture.

Many community-led services have inspiring histories. There is a playgroup in Auckland for Somali refugees, for example, that is the result of the determination of one woman from the Somali community. She worked closely with Ministry of Education regional staff to set up her Somali playgroup. It has been running now on a volunteer basis for the past six years. While running it, this woman studied part-time to get her early childhood education Diploma.

Her group is a wonderful example of the richness that blends of culture bring to our country – of the possibilities created by blending New Zealand early childhood education with her Somali Muslim culture. For example, she composed original music in the Somali language but in a Western style teaches such things as parts of the body. By working with local communities, we can grow participation even if it is on a street-by-street basis.

Affordability is critical to ensuring access and participation in early childhood education. Whether families decide a service is affordable depends on the: cost of the service, family income, and the importance the family places on early childhood education.

We know that our early childhood education remains affordable in terms of cost and family income. Between July 2007 and June 2008 the average cost of early childhood education fell by approximately a third.  Since July 2007, the New Zealand Government has subsidised 100 percent of the average costs of providing early childhood education. This supports three, four and some five year olds to attend early childhood education for up to 20 hours per week across different types of services.  At 1 July 2008, 82 percent of all enrolments by three to five year olds in early childhood education were using 20 Hours ECE.  In round figures, the 2007/08 budget for 20 Hours ECE was $400 million.

This is a significant cost to our Government and challenging in the current economic environment.  One of the benefits of a challenging environment, however, is it makes us look closely at what works and where the evidence shows we can do the most good.

We need to assess at this stage what 20 Hours ECE has achieved for our target group. We know that 82 percent of all enrolled children were using the subsidy by July 2008. However, in the first year that the subsidy was available, it did not significantly improve the participation of our target groups of Māori and Pasifika children.

Why is this? There are some possible reasons.

• Cost may not be the only barrier to participation for some families.


• The services in the area have not matched the needs of the parents and children. For example, this could be because the parents would have preferred to go to a community programme catering for their cultural and language needs.


• We know we need more services and the teachers to go with them. However, the growth is in Māori and Pasifika children and there are not enough Māori and Pasifika teachers qualified to work in these centres.

So we need to keep on considering what helps us reach those we want to reach. We plan to act in geographical areas where participation rates are lower than the national average. One initiative for this is targeted intervention to ensure equality of access to early childhood education services.

For example, this year we are working on improving participation with the South Auckland region of Counties Manukau which has a large and growing population. EC services participation rates in south Auckland are considerably lower than the rest of New Zealand. The percentage of year 1 students in South Auckland who attended EC service in 2008 was 86.9%, compared to 94.7% for New Zealand. 

Broken down by Territorial  Authority, the participation rates for Manukau City are: 85.8% for Papakura and 92.1% for the Franklin district. The types of barriers  we are dealing with here include:

• engaging with families about the importance of early childhood education for their children


• ensuring there are enough services to cater to the children and their specific needs, and


• minimising other costs such as transport or the cost of attendance.

Our approach is to tailor locally-based solutions to overcome these barriers. Sometimes we are dealing with schools that know their local communities and are willing to enable and support services on their sites. Sometimes we are working with individuals like the Somali woman, who can motivate and engage a specific community. What we do have, and must maintain, is a highly flexible and responsive model.

It requires significant levels of cooperation between government agencies, local government, community-based and private organisations. However, it does promote good exchanges of information and partnerships do add value to the programmes provided to children. 

Our Government is also committed to maintaining the quality of our early childhood education. We want to ensure that early childhood education continues to provide the type of foundation for our children’s education that helps them achieve all the way through school. Providing a quality education is an important part of encouraging participation.

There is no one agreed way of achieving quality. The factors are interrelated and teachers, parents and policy makers all have different understandings and priorities. What we do know, is that the type of interaction between trained adults and children, the ratio of trained adults to children, group size and qualification levels of teachers, all make a difference to quality.

Independent evaluations of our service quality have been helpful in determining where we need to focus our efforts. New Zealand services are doing well in a number of areas.

• Most teachers are making good use of interactions with children to foster oral language, develop social skills and extend children’s interests and ideas.


• The learning environments in most infant and toddler centres are attractive and well resourced.

While there are high quality practices found across all services, there is a wide variation in the quality of education provided.  One of the tasks of our new Government will be to ensure that good practices are more consistently acted on across all centres in New Zealand.

We know from research that professional development and examples of good teaching practice improves quality, so professional development is one avenue we can use to improve quality in areas where we want to see improvement.

Our professional development programmes provide strategies to improve learning outcomes for children and strengthen teaching practices. This approach is already working and we have seen positive effects on quality – for example, in relation to improving assessment competencies.

We also have professional development programmes in place to support teachers to be confident in delivering our bilingual early childhood education curriculum, Te Whāriki.

We have improved quality by increasing the number of qualified and registered early childhood education teachers.

Our regulations require 50 percent of staff in early childhood education services to be qualified. However, there are currently targets and funding incentives to raise this percentage even higher. We have a number of initiatives in place to support this goal including scholarships, grants, and recognition of prior learning.

At present, over 60 per cent of our teachers are qualified and registered, and 18 percent of unqualified staff working in early childhood education services are studying towards a recognised qualification – and enrolments for 2009 are higher than ever.

One of our specific challenges in this area is the uneven distribution of qualified teachers across our country. For example, Auckland, which has a large number of services, has a low proportion of teachers who are qualified. I plan to develop and trial initiatives which are aimed specifically at finding local solutions to these problems.

In addition, Māori and Pasifika teachers are less likely to hold a qualification that leads to teacher registration than European/Pakeha. However, the uptake of enrolments by Māori and Pasifika is increasing steadily and we will encourage and support that uptake.

Our Government is committed to improving quality through changing adult:child ratios. Ratios in New Zealand are currently regulated at 1:10 for over twos in all day services and 1:5 for under twos. We want to improve this further by moving to a 1:4 ratio for under twos in the next few years. It’s safer, and it ensures very young children get the care they need.

Many services already have this level of care, but we are phasing in the new ratio over time to reduce the impact of the extra cost on centres and to allow for workforce and recruitment policies to have an effect. I have outlined some of what is happening in the area of improving quality. However, in terms of future directions, the question we have been asking ourselves recently is ‘do we have the right focus?’  New Zealand has been putting its efforts into areas of structural quality - such as teacher qualifications and ratios. It has achieved internationally recognised high standards - a recent UNICEF report showed that New Zealand was one of only five other OECD countries to be performing well in this area. But we have been asking ourselves if this is enough.

Qualified teachers and good ratios cannot guarantee good interactions between adults and children. We are acknowledging that quality consists of a complex set of inputs and we want to further promote quality in our early childhood education services by building on our existing professional development and teaching resources.

As a Government, we are also concerned with issues of sustainability. Services with low occupancy and high staff turnover are at higher risk of closing. And we all know that services can’t run for too long on an operating deficit. So the indicators we look for are: occupancy rates, profitability, and turnover. Our situation is currently in reasonable health, and sustainability has improved. We have stable or rising rates of occupancy and fewer services with operating deficits. We want to ensure this continues.

As Minister of Education and Tertiary Education, I oversee education from early childhood education through to tertiary.

Although each level has different challenges, there are constant themes.

I have spoken today about the benefits of early childhood education and our drive to increase participation. Achievement and participation are linked at every level of our education system. Earlier I said that quality early childhood education leads to gains in literacy and numeracy.

These gains continue throughout a child’s schooling and life. The Competent Children, Competent Learners study in New Zealand showed that early childhood education experiences were still contributing to positive outcomes in literacy and numeracy for 16 year olds. 

The long-term effects of early childhood education are of particular interest to our Government. Our priority in primary schools is raising standards in literacy and numeracy. The work for this is part of developing and implementing clear and consistent National Standards for student achievement.

In the initial stages, National Standards had its critics. This was because people feared that it meant introducing programmes such as the USA and UK have implemented. However, National Standards for New Zealand is about teachers using existing literacy and numeracy assessment methods to identify problems early, and better support student learning in their classrooms and schools.

So, we want all children to have the benefit of early childhood education. And we want all students at primary and secondary school to stay engaged, learn and achieve success, because we know that achievement and participation are linked at every level of education. Ensuring our Māori children have access to good quality early childhood education is part of providing Māori with a solid foundation to their learning.

Many Māori learners do very well at both primary and secondary levels. But statistics show clear overrepresentation in areas like low literacy and numeracy.

Our plan for Maori learners, Ka Hikitia: Managing for Success, is designed to ensure our system lifts its performance for Māori students by ensuring the education system is responsive to language, identity and culture. Our approach here is consistent with our approach to early childhood education. Our response is based on evidence that what works for Māori is recognition of their language, culture and identity and it clearly shows.

Kōhanga reo play an important role in this process. Kōhanga reo are early childhood education immersion services that reinforce for families and wider whānau groups, the value of their culture and language so children can begin their education as Māori learners.

My Government aims to provide parents with more opportunities for being involved in their children’s education and more choices about how this happens. We value the role of parents and trust in their ability to make the right decisions for their children.

We want parents to know at what level their child is achieving and how to support them with what they need to learn next. We know this makes it possible to address learning difficulties at an earlier stage. Clear communication is part of building strong relationships among schools, learners, their families, whānau.

In early childhood education, this means improving parent participation in all our early childhood centres – whatever type of service they provide. At both primary and secondary school, our Government emphasises strong partnerships between Māori students, whānau, iwi, Māori communities and schools. When local iwi work with schools, strong positive relationships are made that really contribute to Māori achieving at school.

New Zealand has come a long way in the last 20 years. We are proud of the quality of our high quality early childhood education system, and we want every child to be able to participate.

We want to respond successfully to the challenges before us – social, economic, and educational. I look forward to learning from your country’s successes.

Education is the biggest intervention in a child’s life outside of their home. That’s what makes it such a responsibility to get it right at every level – from early childhood through to tertiary.

My Government is ambitious for all our children. We expect a great deal. Our children deserve nothing less.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.