Has your service broken the rules? Look Up
The Education (Early Childhood Services) Regulations 2008 and licensing criteria set out the minimum requirements for things like staffing, safety, health, management and curriculum.
When a service is found to be operating in breach of one or more licensing requirements, the consequence can be a downgrade in licence from a full to a provisional licence, a licence suspension, or cancellation of the licence.
A provisional licence is issued for a fixed period of time during which the service is expected to become compliant in order to return to its full licence status. For information on the reasons for licence suspension and cancellation click here.
Please note that the lists below cannot be taken as being inclusive of every service that breached licensing requirements in any year. There may be many more that we do not know about it. This is because:
- The Ministry of Education which is the regulatory body responsible for ensuring that every service meets the regulatory requirements, does not do annual or any regular licensing checks of services. Problems tend to only come to its attention following serious injury to a child, because of a complaint from a parent or member of the public, and sometimes from what the Education Review Office might comment on during its pre-announced visits to services every 3 or 4 years.
- The Ministry of Education may choose not to formally put a service on notice for breaches even when there has been a serious incident involving a child. The Ministry may for example, take into consideration how a licence reclassification will affect the business or if the service provider threatens to bring in lawyers leading to the Ministry weighing up the potential cost against the benefits of downgrading the service's licence.