Should you Pick Your Child’s ECE Service Based on its ERO Report?
Advice commonly given to parents is to check the latest Education Review Office (ERO) report on an early childhood service before deciding to use it.
Parents can also be led to believe that if a service passes an ERO review then it fully meets all legal requirements and regulations.
What you are not told is that an ERO report doesn’t give the full picture on a service and it may not necessarily be an accurate reflection of the service at the time your child will be attending.
It’s not ERO’s job to ensure that ECE services comply with minimum standards and regulations – that’s the role of the Ministry of Education. ERO may find a service is not meeting a legal requirement, but it is powerless to issue penalties or downgrade a service’s licence.
Scheduled visits can be as far apart as 4 years. This is a problem because service practices and performance usually do not remain static over-time, for example there may be changes in staff, management, the financial position of the service, and family demographics. Children can be attending during a period of time in which their service is never actually visited by the ERO.
How meticulous a service has been with paperwork and put time into preparing the kind of documented evidence that ERO reviewers have on their checklist determines whether it gets a positive report from ERO or not.
ERO’s checks mostly involve viewing paperwork, so a report on a service is not always a full reflection on the teaching and care practices that happen with children in the service.
Services are given four weeks’ notice of visits from ERO, so they may be able to ensure staffing on the day is extra high and they’ve completed relevant paperwork. For this reason, ERO reports may not accurately represent how a service operates on a day-to-day basis and when the ERO is not there.
ERO reviewers/staff do not need to hold an ECE recognised qualification or have previous experience in the ECE field. The expertise that evaluators are required to have is expertise in evaluation only. They work across ECE, primary and secondary school sectors.
The views of owners and operators/managers are used by ERO to form part of the overall judgements ERO makes about the service. It is not known to incorporate parents’ and children’s views into their judgement of a service.
Home-based ECE agencies are reviewed by ERO often without reviewers visiting the homes of all the educators to check on practices and standards.
If parents are using ERO reports to help guide their decision making around ECE, they may also want to look at services’ compliance history (the Office of Early Childhood Education collates annual lists of services’ non-compliance on its website).
Visiting the service in person with your child, seeing how your child responds to the people and to being at the service, using a checklist, and asking lots of questions is helpful when making decisions about enrolling your child at an ECE service.
You might also want to check out parent ratings and reviews from other parents and whānau.
Learn how to read Education Review Office (ERO) reports: A guide for parents confused by the terminology
You can find more information about ERO and its reporting on the Office of Early Childhood Education’s website.
Parents have a right to report problems with an ECE service and make a complaint against a service
