Kyoda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald.
We're halfway through the year.
But there have already been a number of confronting headlines about early childhood education providers in twenty twenty five. Earlier this year, the Herald ran a number of stories around children escaping from centers around the country, and in the last week, two coroners' reports have come out highlighting tragic
deaths that befell two young children. The news comes after a review by the Ministry of Regulation into ecees and how they operate, with another review just announced by the Education Ministry into funding coming next Today on the Front Page, we're discussing what's happening with the rules, regulations and funding with doctor Sarah Alexander, Chief Advisor to the Office of Early Childhood Education. Sarah, I want to start with some high profile stories that The Herald has covered this year
around early childhood education centers. Notably, in the last week, we've reported on two coroners' findings around death related to ecees. The first was about Lorenzo Miranda, who was twenty months when he suffered a fatal but invisible head injury after
a fallback in twenty seventeen. He later died in hospital, and findings found that ECE workers could not have expected to have identified something was wrong with Lorenzo, but it was noted they should have informed the parents about what happened.
What do you make of this case?
In my opinion, to me, it's pretty much of a cover up. I believe that the workers, that the teachers should have known what had happened, that it was possible to recognize some of the signs of a serious hit injury, and that there were a number of failings in the case of of this early childhood service that he attended.
Is there anything to learn from this event?
Reading the reports from the Ministry of Education, from Work Safe and from the coroner, what we can gather from those reports is that little Lorenzo potentially probably fell from an adult sized chair. There was an adult sized table and cheers in the center. That should not be the case. You know, I'm of the belief that if a child's feet can't touch the floor when they're seated, then that
seat is too big for them. So you know, firstly, there was inappropriate furniture there, and I think that's a lesson for all of their child's services and for parents when they're you know, going down to look for an early child's service for their child. You know, what is the size of the furniture? Is the furniture that my child is going to be using safe? Another thing was that there was on that particular day that Lorenzo had his fall, there was staff coming and going, there was
a birthday party happening in the room. There was really
no one person looking after him that day. Know, he was cared for by multiple staff, so there wasn't a primary you know what we call a primary caregiver, And that's just something else that we would like to see in the office of ec Change, you know, a requirement that for under two year olds in particular, because they're so vulnerable, that under two year olds to have someone who is responsible for them and who will look out for them at all times, someone who's keeping an eye
on them. Then there was also the issue that the fall was not recorded, so there was no information passed on to the family that Lorenzo had fallen, probably from the cheer because he was seen lying at the bottom of the adult side's cheer and also possible signs of head injury were missed. And you know, the main one there is drowsiness because when the parents came to pick him up, you know, he was lying in the lap of a teacher and extremely drowsy, and you know that
was not like him. And you know, not at that time of day either.
Domestic ending, nobody told me anything I went to pick him up, so we had no clue. We were just handed over a baby that was had a brain bleed and we didn't know. Cause that's one of the hardest things as well, was you know, I held him when he came into the world, and I also that we also held him when he left the world.
It's just.
It's not something that you want to do as a parent ever ever.
And the other case was one that your organization actually spotted around the death of a five month old back in twenty twenty three.
Why did this one catch your attention?
It caught our.
Attention because it's one of probably many cases in early childhood. But it caught our attention because it was an unexplained deaths. But there were a number of features, a number of things seemed to add up to this unexplained death. That possibly if these things weren't happening at the time, that baby might still be alive.
Now and can you tell me what happened.
So it started off with, you know, five months old baby, you know, seemingly healthy, you know, apart from what infants often get is you know, colds and running you know, running noses, and he had had a bit of a cough at the time. He was fed for lunch a pouch of baby food. But the teacher said at the time that he had his food, that he didn't take to eating the food very well, and that that was
unusual for him. He was put to bed with a loose blanket, which is not following guidance for the protection you know, to mitigate the risks of sud I in terms of sudden death. So you know, that's not a best practice thing, you know, to put a baby to bed with loose bedding, with a loose blanket. He was also put into a room with up to eight other infants and left to sleep, only being checked every ten minutes or so. Now, an early child is centers, you
know that can be busy places, noisy places. So a lot of centers had doors on the sleep rooms. Doors the sleep from door may or may not have been closed. It's not mentioned in the reports. There might not have been a baby monitor. So really that those nine babies who were sleeping in the room at the time we're lived without an adult watching over them, and yet the Ministry of Education says that that's perfectly fine because that
meets current regulation standards. We believe that infants, particularly should have someone watching over them, someone who can see them when you're sleeping.
Yeah, in both of those cases, do you think the regulations in place at the moment go far enough to protect children? Because in both situations it seems that there's been changes made as a result of these deaths.
Not really, believe it or not, there seems to have been quite a cover up because you know, we're just reporting the stories now. These deaths happened some time ago.
You know, the five month old baby die back in twenty twenty three, and the child who dived from a fatal fall that was back in twenty seventeen, so you know, their information's not out there that What the Ministry of Education has done has just basically been to maybe put some more advice on their website or to provide links through to other agencies to health agencies on recommended best practices.
But regulations have a changed, requirements haven't changed. Babies can still be put down to sleep in a sleep rome and left unchecked for ten minutes at a time at adult sized furniture can still be in playrooms for children who were too young to use that size of furniture and not given good supervision around that furniture. And you know, there is no requirement for a primary caregiver for infants in early childhood services. So there haven't been any regulation improvements.
In fact, regulations were better some years ago.
Back in two thousand, before two thousand and eight, I think it was regulations before two thousand and eight require that there'd be an adult in the room when children were resting or sleeping.
Well, that just seems like common sense. Why isn't that happening?
It does seem like common sense, and you'd expect all early chittered services to be following common sense, but it seems, you know from our investigations that actually it doesn't. Common sense isn't always followed. You know, early chided services are busy places. They can have high staff. High staff turn either.
They can be run by operators who don't know what best practices are and aren't aware of research, and so you know they'll follow the regulations perhaps, but those regulations in themselves aren't adequate enough when there is a lack of knowledge about best practices and when there are other streetses and strains on the services, meaning that you know
they won't go that extra mile. And we'd like to see services go that extra mile and do the best practices and provide the high quality and be aware of what can lead to injuries into deaths, because you know one andrey one dar is just one two innings.
The other situation the Herald has covered a lot earlier this year was around children managing to escape for lack of a better term, from their ec centers. Now. Information obtained by the Rotarua Daily Post under the Official Information Act found that between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, three hundred and twenty one children managed to abscond.
Are you surprised by those figures?
No, And those figures probably represent just kind of like the tip of the iceberg because it's not a requirement for services to report to the Ministry of Education of the child escapes, so it could be a lot more. The figure could be much much higher than there, and we don't know because it's not a requirement to report
child escapes. And the word child escape in itself is language that perhaps we shouldn't be using, but as indicative of the state of the early childhood sector in terms of the laxness of regulations and the fact that we see children escaping rather than children wanting to be in their early childhood service and loving being there, you know.
And what we want is, you know, for every child to be leager in the morning and want to dash out the door and go to the early childhood service because it's a great place to be rather than a place to escape from.
Should there be penalties or something in place for ecs that I suppose have in an abscondee.
In some cases it's because of the child has high needs in terms of behavior and they might just climb the fence because you know, the climbers. Yeah. In terms of whether or not there should be penalties, it should.
What we are advocating in the Office of Early Childhood Education is for information for parents to be made available on when there have been escapes, when there have been there is incidents when there have been deaths, so there is transparency because then parents or teachers that are going to work at a service and other services can know, hey, these are the things that we need to change in our service, so you know, this sort of thing won't
happen again, or it won't happen at our service. And I think that's a real issue, is the lack of transparency.
The fact that you know, these two cases of child death, there have been you know, multiple serious other cases of serious injuries that over time will be uncovered and that we'll be discussing, you know, more about because you know, we've got a commitment in the Office of ECE to start the ball rolling to get some transparency going because the Ministry of Education at the moment does not want
these cases to be known. And you know, even the Ministry for Regulation, David Seymour has recently required that that ECE be his first target for the Ministry for Regulation to do a review of regulations. Now the Ministry for Regulation has completed its report, changes to base, it cut out a lot of regulations and requirements have been approved
by Cabinet. This is serious because you know, as these cases that you know we are talking about show regulations not strong enough as it is, and we need tighter regulations rather than fewer regulations. And we also need regulations to be in areas where we know there are needs for requirements to be set, because otherwise the requirements may not be followed within an early childhood service.
The report makes fifteen recommendations to modernize and simplify regulations across ECE so that service providers can get on with what they do best, providing safe, high quality spaces.
For children to reach their potential.
The Ministry is recommended removing, changing, or merging approximately three quarters of the ninety eight licensing criteria for center based services, simplifying the system so it focuses on children's and education instead of paperwork.
Regulations around early childhood education have been in the spotlight of course, this year, the Ministry of Regulation shows easy Ease, like you said, is the first sector a review looking.
At the laws.
Those include more flexible requirements around qualifications for staff and reducing licensing criteria by about seventy five percent. Firstly, can you explain what licensing criteria is?
Well, when you get a warrant fitness of your car, there is like a checklist and the mechanic will go through and check you know, breaks, steering and so on, seat belts and so forth. The same with an early
chartered service. When someone wants to open an early charted service, the Ministry will go into it with its checklist and check off that it's doing these things, and then it's expected to continue doing these things while it's operating, so you know, both before it starts operating and while it's operating.
And if the service, it's mostly through complaints and through serious incidents that the Ministry finds out that a service may potentially be having problems in complying with the licensing requirements and it will then go into a check. In New Zealand, we don't have a system of regular checks on early childhood services by the Ministry of Education.
I've read some comments from you where it's clear you aren't happy about these changes. In one report, you said it would weaken the care of our children and that it paved the way for baby farming.
What do you mean by that?
Yes, well, we're very concerned and you know, in my opinion, the regulatory change as will because the Ministry for Regulation didn't take into account and its recommendations. What we can learn from serious incidents. It didn't look into complaints that have been made about early childhood services to see, well, you know, how can regulations be better and provide better protection for children and enhance improve the standard of their care and education. Instead, you know, it's like a how
can we slash regulations and requirements? And then we've also got the added worry about this clause within the Ministry for Regulations recommendations to allow for a mix of qualifications. Now, really we should be having teachers who are knowledgeable about child development, who have completed a high level of training
working in early childhood services. You know, where parents leave their children, they entrust their child and the care of someone and they expect that person to have knowledge about, you know, what is the best way to care for the child, and you know, in terms of being a good educator and teacher. And so we're very worried that, you know, the qualification requirements already are very loose in
terms of the number of qualified staff required. It's possible at times for them to be no early childed education qualified teacher working with children. You know, it's allowed for someone to be a primary school trained teacher who's trained to work with older children, and the rest of the
staff maybe have had no training at all. They could be you know, kids straight out of school seven, you know, eighteen year olds for example, so or just you know, just relief teachers who aren't qualified, who haven't been through the teaching counsel and got a practicing certificate and been verified that they meet the standards of being a teacher.
Sarah, I don't have children, but I'm still terrified by what I'm hearing from you. Is there anything in the regulations or anything in the changes that actually can quell fears, or is the fact of the matter is that the government needs to tighten, actually tighten regulations around e ces.
There's nothing in the changes that are going to quell the fears. You know, we've got a bad situation already and it could potentially get worse. And you know that's why I say, you know, there's a high risk here that we're going to go to the level of child farming because you know, we reduce the regulations down and and trust service providers. You know, some know, some services will continue to operate really well and do wonderfully by children. Others we are you know, for example, money is a
motive for operating the service. You know, that is putting children at risk, and we shouldn't allow that risk. You know, we should have stringent standards and they should be good policing, monitoring by the Ministry for Education because you know, that's what we parents rely on and that's what we'd love to see as a sector where everyone's providing you know, safe, high quality care and education for children.
Thanks for joining us, Sarah.
Thank you.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzadherld dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.