Submission to the Education and Workforce Committee
On the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill
From: ECE Parents’ Council Aotearoa.
Date: 31/08/2025.
ECE Parents’ Council Aotearoa represents parents and caregivers across Aotearoa New Zealand who are committed to high-quality, accessible, and safe early childhood education (ECE) for our tamariki.
We oppose the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill in its entirety and respectfully submit that it should not proceed.
1. Flawed Consultation Process
The Bill was advanced through a rushed, opaque, and compromised consultation.
It excluded the very stakeholders it claims to serve—parents, families, and whānau.
By sidelining parents’ voices and experiences with ECE, the process undermines the legitimacy of any resulting changes.
The Ministry for Regulation ignored our submission and recommendations in its Regulatory Review of Early Childhood Education report.
We had hoped that despite the terms of the review’s terms of reference, the Ministry for Regulation would recommend strengthening regulations and licensing criteria instead of removing and reducing many of the essential elements that are important to parents and children (and the people teaching and caring for our children in services).
We had hoped that it would put the interests and rights of children, parents, families, social-welling and cultural continuity at the forefront. But this did not happen.
The final Review Report included a ‘Proposed Changes to Licensing Criteria’ Venn diagram (page 17) displaying only licensing criterion numbers, not their content.
Parents would need to firstly understand how to interpret the diagram, then cross-reference each number with a licensing criteria reference to discover that, for example, C12 (requiring centres to involve parents in decision-making about their child’s learning) is being removed entirely.
Likewise, criteria requiring acknowledgement of Māori as tangata whenua and ensuring children understand the dual heritages of Te Tiriti partners are also being stripped away.
This design hides major quality reductions behind intimidating jargon and complexity for whānau.
2. Threats to Child Safety and Trust and Erosion of Standards, Quality and Diversity
If passed, this Bill will make ECE less safe for our babies and young children.
It reduces oversight to vague “risk-based monitoring,” with no clear thresholds or criteria.
Without consistent, comprehensive checks, parents cannot be confident that every service meets the same standard.
Uneven scrutiny invites breaches of trust—placing children and families at risk.
Cabinet has signalled support for removing or watering down key licensing criteria, including: curriculum requirements, governance and management standards, caregiving practices, qualified staffing expectations, and mandatory display of complaints procedures and regulations.
The Bill also favours graduated compliance tools over strong penalties, risking leniency toward providers operating under unsafe conditions. This directly contradicts its stated commitment to child safety, wellbeing, and parental involvement.
The Bill defines “quality” as the bare minimum required by regulation.
It strips away the richness, responsiveness, and cultural diversity families expect and imposes uniform, bland provisions that fail to reflect family values or community characteristics.
By embedding workforce participation as a core purpose, the Bill shifts ECE away from child development and learning, and family support.
Education legislation should have at its centre tamariki and their learning—social, emotional, physical, and cognitive—rather than adult employment needs.
3. The Bill Does Not Lift Real Incomes of New Zealanders
Our submission to the Ministry for Regulation highlighted a critical gap: the regulatory review is about lowering regulatory standards while placing no controls on the fees charged to parents. In effect, any cost savings flow straight to providers—families see none of the benefits.
Despite ministerial promises to reduce costs for families, this Amendment Bill remains silent on fee regulation:
- No requirement for providers to publish financial records.
- No cap on fees and fee increases.
- No transparency around how ECE fees are set or justified.
This Bill effectively relegates parents to “bill-payers”.
The government already provides $3.1 billion annually to ECE providers, yet this Bill includes no provisions to curb profiteering. Parents remain exposed to escalating fees—even as public subsidies grow.
Meanwhile, it does nothing to address:
- Families under pressure: New Zealand families spend among the highest proportion of household income on childcare globally—up to 35–38% for full-time care for two children. While a recent CPI adjustment showed a temporary 22.8% fall in ECE costs (year to June 2025), this largely reflects the one-off FamilyBoost rebate, not genuine structural affordability. In reality, fees continue to surge.
- Fee opacity: Private providers are not required to publicly display fees. In a sector receiving billions in taxpayer subsidies, parents should be able to easily compare costs across services. This Bill fails to mandate even that basic level of transparency.
- Drain on real incomes: Every dollar spent on ECE fees is a dollar not available for food, housing, transport, or savings. Far from lifting real incomes, this Bill entrenches a system that erodes them.
- No uplift for teachers: Despite billions in public investment, the Bill does nothing to ensure fair wages or job security for ECE qualified teachers—the frontline of service quality and child wellbeing.
- Hidden risks compound economic harm: Lowering standards and oversight increases the risk of service closures, safety incidents, or regulatory breaches—costs that ultimately fall on families and the public.
With no visibility into pricing decisions, parents cannot predict or challenge rising charges. As a result, families will continue to face unpredictable—and potentially unaffordable—ECE costs.
4. Restricting Parental Knowledge and Autonomy
One explicit function of the proposed Director of Regulation is to “help improve the knowledge of parents, caregivers, and other interested parties about the quality of early childhood education.”
This is problematic because:
- Gatekeeping: Granting a single official control over how “quality” is communicated risks curating what parents are permitted to know and think. Parents deserve transparent, unfiltered access to staffing records including ratios and qualifications of staff, child safety records, inspection reports, compliance data, and the full range of service feedback.
- Risk of silencing opposing views: True trust in the regulatory system comes from genuine openness—parents must be confident it will protect their children and foster positive learning, not simply promote a managed narrative.
5. Undermining the Government’s Stated Goals
The Education and Training (ECE Reform) Amendment Bill fails to demonstrate how its proposed changes will:
- Deliver more effective, efficient, and responsive public services.
- Lift the real incomes of New Zealanders.
- Improve the discipline and management of risks around public spending.
Instead, it actively undermines these goals by:
- Eroding accountability: The Bill creates a new statutory role with broad delegations and limited oversight, opening the door to self-regulation by providers—particularly those aligned with service-based lobby groups. This weakens protections for tamariki, erodes public trust, and sidelines whānau from decision-making.
- Scrapping licensing criteria: Removing clear, enforceable rules lowers the quality bar. Eliminating the requirement for centres to prominently display their license or regulatory obligations makes the system less consistent and transparent. Rather than improving responsiveness, this creates confusion for parents and enables poor-quality provision to go unchecked.
- Privileging business interests: The Bill requires the government to market private business services (e.g., “communicate options to parents”), diverting taxpayer resources away from child outcomes and toward subsidising commercial providers.
6. The Bill Increases, Rather than Reduces, Fiscal and Regulatory Risk
- Undisciplined public spending: The Bill explicitly requires the Crown “to provide information to parents, caregivers, and other interested parties on those services to improve knowledge about the quality of services, including to inform parental choice.” This wording is vague and risks being interpreted as taxpayer-funded marketing of private businesses. No other part of the education system works this way — the government does not advertise private schools or universities — yet this Bill obliges it to promote private ECE providers, regardless of performance. This is not disciplined spending; it is a subsidy for business marketing.
- Shifting risk onto taxpayers and parents: By weakening licensing criteria and oversight, providers can extract more profit while taxpayers and parents shoulder the consequences of failures. If a centre cuts corners, it is families and the public who bear the cost — through remediation, safety risks, or lost learning opportunities.
- No performance accountability: Despite billions in subsidies, the Bill introduces no requirement for providers to demonstrate improved outcomes for children, parents, or teachers. Public money is effectively handed over with minimal strings attached.
- A framework ripe for manipulation: As we’ve previously stated, the Bill embeds the influence of well-resourced for-profit lobbyists. A flow on effect of this is that other parts of the sector (such as low-cost and not-for-profit provider groups) have to compete and strategise for revenue survival alongside for-profit lobbyists. Because their very survival is at stake, this raises serious questions about whether they can genuinely represent tamariki and whānau in closed-door meetings with ministers.
- Open-ended liability for the Crown: In weakening the regulatory framework and lowering minimum standards, the Crown inherits greater liability for failures. In practice, this increases fiscal risk, rather than reducing it. Implementing lower standards will not absolve the Crown from having to pay costs if a child is harmed or something goes wrong due to inadequate protections. If/when these situations happen, the Crown could be exposed to a risk of litigation as parents may take court action, including international legal action for breach of children’s rights. In aged care, we have seen how repeated failures in private rest homes — many owned by investment chains — have forced costly interventions after standards slipped. These examples show what happens when profit-driven operators are given public money without strong oversight: taxpayers and government picks up the bill.
- Contradicts Budget 2025 priorities: Instead of improving efficiency and risk management, this Bill creates a system where public money flows with fewer checks and balances, outcomes are opaque, and risks are transferred to families.
7. Breach of Partnership with Whānau
The foundation of early childhood education in Aotearoa has always been partnership with parents and whānau. This principle is not only good practice, it reflects Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations to share power, ensure meaningful voice, and protect tamariki.
This Bill fundamentally breaches that principle:
- Parents sidelined: Families, who pay the bills and entrust their children to these services, have been excluded from the design of this reform. For example, the ECE Parents’ Council wrote to Deputy Secretary Andy Jackson in June 2025 requesting representation on the Ministry of Education’s ECAC, as the only national organisation representing parents. Our request was declined, with the Ministry stating it was only interested in hearing from those who deliver services, effectively silencing the families who use and fund them.
- Breach of Te Tiriti principles: The removal of criteria requiring services to reflect the place of Māori as tangata whenua and to support children’s understanding of both Treaty partners undermines the principles of partnership, participation, and protection.
- Silencing whānau voices: The Bill creates a “new sheriff” regulatory role with sweeping powers to delegate authority. Without safeguards, this could enable a culture of control where parents fear reprisal for speaking out.
The Bill’s focus on profit-driven childcare ignores:
- Parents not in paid work who need respite or want to focus on caregiving.
- Children with physical disabilities, autism, or additional learning needs who often thrive in shorter, relationship-based settings.
It will lead to less flexibility in hours and choice for families and will isolate vulnerable families and children.
Rather than fostering genuine partnership, this Bill entrenches a top-down, non-responsive model of service delivery. It shifts power away from whānau and communities and, in doing so, places children at risk.
A system that silences whānau and treats them merely as bill-payers cannot be considered an effective, efficient, or responsive public service.
8. The Power of the Private-for-Profit Lobby
The for-profit ECE lobby has grown into a powerful force—one whose priorities often conflict with the public interest.
A business model built on profit margins does not sit comfortably alongside the goals of high-quality education and care for babies and young children. Cutting costs in teacher-child ratios, professional development, or safe environments too often becomes the path to maintaining and increasing profits.
The Bill recasts ECE as a cost-reduction exercise for service providers. Where preventative safety measures incur expense, children and families will become second priority.
Claims that “burdensome regulations” are driving up costs are not backed by evidence. In fact, the sector is actively marketed as a high-return investment. As noted in a July 2025 listing from Childcare Sales NZ:
“Childcare Sales is experiencing high demand from buyers, with record-high activity and fewer listings fueling fierce competition. NZ is currently in a sellers’ market. We have pre-qualified buyers with budgets from $300k to $1.5m actively seeking childcare businesses and properties in Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington, and Christchurch. Confidentiality agreements surged 19–39% year-on-year, showing investor appetite. Listings fell 10–11%, inflating prices.”
(Childcare Sales NZ, July 2025)
This is not the profile of a sector burdened by regulation. It is a sector delivering strong private returns—often from public money.
This Bill removes the very safeguards needed to prevent that conflict from harming tamariki. If for-profit providers are to continue receiving billions in public subsidies, there must be:
- Robust regulation that sets a strong baseline for quality care and education.
- Strengthened licensing criteria—not weakened standards.
- Oversight of fee-charging practices.
- A review of profiteering, including spending on property portfolios instead of investing in children’s care, education, and well-paid, ECE qualified teachers.
- Stronger penalties to deter non-compliance and protect children.
- A truly independent ECE complaints authority—empowering parents and the public to report issues such as:
- Unfair fee-charging practices.
- Mishandling of complaints by government agencies (including the Ministry of Education and WorkSafe).
- Harmful incidents or practices, including those not currently covered by regulation.
Regulations are not strangling the sector; they are the bare minimum safeguards protecting children and families. Diluting them, as this Bill proposes, will only fatten private margins while eroding public accountability.
Conclusion
This Bill is not aligned with the government’s Budget 2025 priorities. It:
- Reduces efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness of ECE services;
- Redirects public money to private profit while eroding real household incomes;
- Increases fiscal and regulatory risk;
- Has been advanced through a deliberately rushed, exclusionary, and misleading consultation process;
- Breaches Te Tiriti principles and silences parents and whānau who know their children best;
- Strengthens the power of the for-profit childcare lobby at the expense of the interests of families and the rights of children.
For these reasons, ECE Parents’ Council Aotearoa strongly urges the Education and Workforce Committee to reject this Bill in its entirety.
Signed:
ECE Parents’ Council Aotearoa
