Education Review Office
Education Review Office
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The Education Review Office, or ERO, is a government department. Read more below ...
ERO is independent of the Ministry of Education whose responsibility is to license early childhood services, administer funding, and advise government on early childhood policy.
The key roles of ERO are to (1) visit every licensed early childhood service and make publicly available a review report on what it sees as going well and not going well, and (2) give a couple of ideas to the service on how it might further improve and include these recommendations at the end of the public report. The reports are made publicly available on ERO's website and early childhood services must make a copy of their report available to parents and families.
- Are you a parent who worries about relying only on ERO's report for insight into whether a service would be a quality one for your child?
- Are you with an early childhood service who has been given some recommendations by ERO but you are unsure where to start, and what you need to know to improve and get a better ERO report next time round?
- Would you like to access to networks for childcare and teaching, operating an early childhood service effectively, and research in early childhood education - for hundreds of articles on a range of topics and to read what others say and have your questions answered?
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The Education Review Office and What You Can Expect
Two ERO staff, who may or may not have a qualification and experience working in early childhood education, visit early childhood services and spend a day and sometimes longer looking at documentation, asking questions and observing the programme. They draft a report which is discussed and negotiated with the service managers and owners.
Reports for all early childhood services follow the same standard format and generally include one to two pages of comments about the service; providing parents with a general overview of the ERO reviewers' impression of what they saw and were told at the time they visited.
Early childhood services are reviewed once every 3 years unless a major problem is identified, and then services usually receive what's called a supplementary review six months to a year later.
Services are informed before ERO reviewers call. Spot checks and unannounced visits are not made.
It's quite possible for many children that their service is not visited by ERO during the 2 - 3 years they attend. Also what you might not know is that once an early childhood service is licensed to open it is usually not ever visited again by the Ministry of Education inspectors unless a parent, staff member or concerned community member has made a complaint which the Ministry believes could be credible. So a lot of responsibility for how the service is provided on a day to day basis and for quality assurance lies on the shoulders of the service providers, staff, and families.
While the ERO reports on early childhood services are useful in giving a snap-shot view of what the service was like generally for all children at the time ERO reviewers visited,
- the reports alone cannot provide sufficient information needed for parents to make judgments about the quality of a service for their child,
- people considering applying for work at a service may find it helpful to get more insight into issues of quality and differences between services, and
- providers of early childhood services will want to seek out more information and support networks because they can't maintain a good reputation for quality if they don't know what they should know.
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