This funding review misses the problem with Early Childhood Education

New Zealand was once praised for having one of the most progressive and imaginative visions of early childhood education. Our curriculum, Te Whāriki, is globally recognised for its holistic and child-centred approach, but the system around it has steadily eroded.

The optimism of Te Whāriki era now feels far from a sector marked by inequities, instability and professional exhaustion, and, I would argue, it is the consequence of the mixed-market model underpinning early childhood education provision.

Despite repeatedly recognising the importance of the early years, successive governments have failed to require a fully qualified workforce, or ensure that teachers with equivalent qualifications and responsibilities are fairly and consistently paid.

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Teachers in the sector doing comparable work receive markedly different remuneration and employment conditions depending on the type of service employing them. These inequities compound heavy workloads, burnout, bullying, limited career progression, and the persistent under-recognition of teachers’ expertise.

New Zealand families face some of the highest net childcare costs in the developed world and supply is uneven. Some communities have no accessible early childhood education services, while others experience oversupply, with multiple providers competing for the same families. Rather than providing meaningful choice, this can destabilise otherwise viable services, and undermine the conditions needed for quality services.

Government funding has not kept pace with the rising cost of providing early childhood education. Parents co-fund the system, through widely varying, unregulated fees, and it can be very difficult to determine how their contributions are being used.

How did New Zealand arrive at this point?

Political will or, more accurately, the lack of it. Early childhood education policy is littered with unfinished promises. Commitments to qualified teachers, pay parity, and affordability for families are announced, partially implemented, and then weakened, delayed, or abandoned as political priorities change.

The Early Learning Action Plan 2019–2029 is a good example. Although it promised progress on several longstanding issues, in effect it has become a dead duck: politically abandoned, with subsequent policies stalling and even dismantling parts of its agenda.

The latest attempt to redress issues is the ECE Funding Review, in which the Ministerial Advisory Group has been asked to reconcile affordability for families, fair pay for teachers, service viability, equitable access and value for public money, all within a fiscally neutral envelope.

One colleague likened it to shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Asked to consider “quality trade-offs”, the advisory group has turned with depressing predictability to the largest and most visible cost in any education system: its teachers. Qualified-teacher requirements, pay parity and salary progression, non-contact time and professional learning have all been identified as areas where savings or “rebalancing” might be found.

“Rebalancing” is a revealing word. It implies that the scales have somehow tipped too far in teachers’ favour, despite the reality of a workforce marked by burnout, uneven pay, and under-recognition. What is described as rebalancing is, in fact, a proposal to make teachers absorb the consequences of an underfunded and poorly regulated market.

Where else could the funding review have looked? It could have looked at the mixed-market model underpinning early childhood education provision, a delivery system where the government funds and regulates services, while provision is divided between community-based (not-for-profit) organisations including kindergartens, and a diverse private sector ranging from small owner-operated centres to large for-profit corporations. New Zealand’s mixed-market model places all these services within the same funding system despite their different purposes, obligations and capacities to charge fees or extract profits.

But this system is persistently sidestepped as policymakers search for ways to make the sector work. When it comes to the policy gaze, the market is the elephant in the early childhood education room: conspicuous, consequential and largely left unexamined. Yet its effects run through many of the sector’s most pressing problems.

Remarkably, the Ministry of Education’s own funding-review papers acknowledge there is no comprehensive data on parent fees, and it cannot see private providers income beyond government funding.

We don’t know how much of the total revenue collected is directed towards teacher pay, affordability for families, staffing levels, improvements to children’s experiences or profit.

Yet, the review stops short of demanding transparency over the full pool of money entering the sector or examining the mixed model at all.

The problems associated with mixed-market early childhood education systems are not speculative. The OECD’s 2023 report on equity and inclusion warns that marketised systems can produce higher costs for families, exclude children from low-income households and create risks to quality.

These are all problems the funding review is expected to address. The OECD report calls for stronger regulation of private providers, particularly for-profit operators, alongside funding conditions and measures to limit family costs. It concludes that mixed systems require deliberate oversight to prevent differences in ownership and provision from becoming inequalities in access and quality.

The evidence is there, and so are the consequences: high fees, uneven access, struggling services and an exhausted, undervalued workforce. Until policymakers confront the elephant, no amount of “rebalancing” will fix the room.