Education Review Office reports explained
“Emerging”. “Requires further development”. “Working towards”. These are the kinds of words used to describe how early childhood education services have been assessed by the Education Review Office (ERO).
But what do they actually mean?
As a parent or caregiver with little or no background in ECE, it can be hard to decipher what ERO reports are actually saying.
To help you make sense of the jargon, MyECE has developed this guide to ERO reports.
Why does ERO assess ECE services?
ERO reviews schools, kura and ECE services to assess the quality of learning that goes on there, and to help staff improve their educational practice.
What does all the jargon in ERO reports actually mean?
You might have noticed that not all ERO reports are written in the same way.
That’s because ERO produces two types of reports on ECE services: assurance reviews and quality evaluations. The extent to which an ECE service has complied with regulations (based on ERO’s assessment) usually determines which kind of report ERO completes.
If a service fails to meet half or more of licensing criteria or regulations that ERO checks, and its investigators identify evidence of other problems – such as documents provided to ERO from the service indicate leaders have a limited understanding of licensing criteria, there has been a lot of staff turnover, or a previous ERO report identified issues with regulatory compliance, ERO will conduct an assurance review.
For every other ECE service, ERO does a quality evaluation.
In an assurance review, ERO assesses whether a service is meeting licensing requirements in regards to the curriculum, premises and facilities, health and safety and governance, management and administration.
Quality evaluations are less straightforward to read. The terminology ERO uses in these reports has changed over the past 10 years.
So you might see some reports (from prior to 2020) that assess the service using terms like “Not well placed”, “Requires further development”, “Well placed” and “Very well placed”.
From 2020 to July 2024, ERO used a different set of classifications: “Emerging”, “Establishing”, “Embedding”, “Sustaining” and “Excelling”. Each service was given one of these classifications for the following metrics: collecting information on children’s learning, the extent to which parents and whānau can contribute to curriculum design and planning, how leaders and kaiako collaborate, how the service evaluates its learning and teaching and how leaders ensure there are robust systems and procedures in place.
Since July 2024, ERO has used a new set of terms for quality evaluations: “Improvement required”, “Working towards”, “Embedded” and “Excelling”. ERO considers “Improvement required” and “Working towards” to be below the threshold for quality ECE and “Embedded” and “Excelling” to be above the threshold for quality.
Using this criteria, ERO assesses services across four areas: children’s learning, professional development for teachers, whether the leadership fosters collaboration and improvement and how effective the service’s governance and management is.
It also judges whether the service is taking reasonable steps to ensure children’s health and safety, or if improvement is required there.
Because of the changes to how ERO assesses the quality of ECE services, it can be difficult to compare services that were evaluated in different years. For example: it would be challenging to determine whether a service assessed as “Well placed” in 2019 was better than another one that was given an evaluation of “Sustaining” in 2022.
The latest criteria is probably easier to understand than previous ones, so hopefully with time the reports become easier to read for people without a lot of knowledge of the intricacies of the ECE sector (such as parents and caregivers).
How often does ERO assess services?
Usually, ERO visits a service every three years. However, if a service is assessed as being “well placed” or “excelling” ERO might push out its next visit to four years’ time.
This can mean that an ERO report is just a summary of a “snapshot in time” and is not always an accurate representation of the quality of the service when you’re reading it.
If the report was produced three to four years ago, it’s possible staff, management and even ownership changes have occurred since ERO’s last visit, which could have led to cultural and practice changes within the service.
Whatsmore, ERO doesn’t visit every single ECE service in Aotearoa. For large groups of services (of 14 or more) it instead reviews just the wider ECE organisation and then visits a small selection of services that are part of the group.
The rationale for this is to save ERO money. However, it means that ERO reports are not available for some services that are part of large chains. This in turn means that independent services and smaller groups of services are more closely scruntinised by ERO.
How much weight should I give an ERO report when deciding where to enrol my child?
Reading a service’s ERO report is just one of many ways parents can gauge whether a particular ECE service is right for their child(ren).
However, MyECE wouldn’t recommend parents solely rely on ERO reports when making decisions about what ECE service to enrol their child(ren) in.
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.
Additionally, a lot of ERO’s checks involve viewing paperwork, so it’s not always a full reflection on the teaching that happens in the classroom.
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 ask for recommendations from other parents whom you trust, and check out parent ratings and reviews from other parents and whānau.
You can find more information about ERO and its reporting on the Office of Early Childhood Education’s website.
