Nearly half of the country’s early childhood services are falling short of expected standards.

Monitoring by the Education Review Office (ERO) shows 47% of stand-alone services were below the quality threshold in the 2024/25 year, an improvement from 64% in the previous year.

The data was revealed in Parliament’s Education and Workforce select committee’s annual review of the Education Review Office.

The report stated the committee was “concerned” to hear the statistics.

“We heard from ERO that its reviews cover many domains, including provisions for a safe and inclusive environment. It assesses whether quality is above or below a standard for teaching and learning, professional capability, leadership and governance, and organisational development.”

Early Childhood Council chief executive Simon Laube said the figures resembled steady progress.

“We’re really happy to see that improvement for stand-alone services. Even the best-run centres go through staff changes, and there’s always a cycle of quality improvement,” he said.

Laube stressed that ERO reviews are snapshots, not definitive measures of quality: “What you really want ERO to do is to train providers to be constantly improving and trying to do better.”

He said quality improvement is an ongoing cycle.

“Even the best run centre will get to a point where that centre leader or the curriculum leader is gonna move on one day, and there will be a changeover and you will have to build up again, and you are always going to be in a cycle of quality improvement.”

Laube also highlighted the importance of focusing on curriculum delivery, not just compliance.

He said compliance around things like health and safety - like keeping a first aid kit stocked - are important, but not hard to get right.

“Whereas if you set up those children to get into school and feel positive and motivated to learn, that’s an incredible benefit for that child. And that’s really where you want the emphasis to be going on and making sure the early childhood guys are focused on that equation. Not being caught out for compliance,” he said.

Educator Sally Griffin, a head teacher at a kindergarten and a member of the NZEI Te Riu Roa union, told Newstalk ZB the sector felt under-resourced.

She called for more learning support measures to be implemented: “Teachers are put under an incredible amount of stress in early childhood at the moment. Their working conditions are quite stressful which means that children’s learning conditions are really not ideal.”

Griffin said teachers would like to see the early childhood profession held in the same regard as primary and secondary teachers.

She said teaching environments that have worked well had a high number of qualified staff and quality resources.

“It’s an environment that people want to come to - you’ve got children with smiling faces having a great time and happy to be in that space,” Griffin said.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour said the threshold relates to the extent to which ECE services have the learning and organisational conditions to support outcomes for all learners.

“It doesn’t mean that services below that threshold are performing poorly. The threshold has no effect on licensing or safety compliance which ensures child safety and centre legality,” Seymour said.

He said the sector had improved following a regulatory review from the Ministry for Regulation.

“Services need to be able to get on with their job; providing high quality care to Kiwi children. They don’t need to spend hours on needless back-office compliance,” he said.

“Now, ECE teacher retention is better, turnover is lower, and the number of qualified teachers has increased. These factors will continue to raise the quality of ECE in New Zealand,” Seymour said.