To contact ChildForum go to our Contact Us page
- Dr Sarah Alexander (Chief executive), click or tap here
- Dr Wendy Boyd (Editor, NZ-International Research in ECE Journal), click or tap here
ChildForum provides advice, research and leadership on best practices and policies, to achieve better outcomes for children within the early childhood sector.
What we do
1. Lead public advisor on Early Childhood Education
- We identify issues and keep people up-to-date.
- We provide the biggest online knowledge base on early childcare and education theory, research, practice, and policy in NZ.
- Our people are experts on early childcare and education.
- ChildForum is non-partisan and is not affiliated with any political party or sector group.
2. National membership organisation for the ECE Sector
- Members include service providers, parents, teaching staff, tertiary educators, researchers, analysts, and others.
- We cover all publicly-funded and licensed services (private and community, home-based and centre based, parent and teacher-led). We provide employers and service providers with management and employment guidance and support to grow their service’s quality.
- We work to educate and inspire changes in approaches and practices that are in the interests of children and improvement in the quality and reputation of our sector.
3. Advocacy for children and early childhood education
Our vision is for an open and transparent early childhood education system, that supports the provision of diverse services to meet different child, family, community and cultural needs. Early childhood services must be enabled to be the best they can be for children and families.
Present needs that we advocate for change/ improvement in are:
- children's rights must underpin funding decisions, policies and regulations - that this is not the case is a serious failing
- for government and government officials to uphold 'early childhood education and care' and to pull back from downgrading our sector further by renaming and reclassifying what we do to simply 'early learning'
- pay parity for all qualified and certificated teachers in ECE with school teachers
- adequate non-contact time for all teachers in centres and home-based visiting teachers
- stronger conditions and accountability for use of public funds by service providers
- regulation to bring in maximum group or class sizes in centres
- at least half of the adults in every teacher-led centre who are counted as being in ratio have had ECE training and are ECE qualified teachers who hold a practising certificate
- improvement in the oversight of ECE service compliance with minimum standards by the Ministry of Education, including the introduction of spot checks/ unannounced visits
- all families of children attending a service to receive notification when their service has been found to breach any minimum standard - no more cover-ups!
- employers and managers to provide evidence of training in anti-bullying practices and workplace safety to maintain their service's licence to operate
- support Te Kōhanga Reo training qualifications at Level 7 for teacher registration and certification
- support home-based educators with a recognised Level 7 ECE teaching qualification for teacher registration and certification
- recognition of the contibution of parent education alongside child education in early childhood services for better outcomes for children
- restoration of 'free kindergartens' as a sessional community-based pre-school service that every child has a right to participate in regardless of ability to pay, or the establishment of a new free publicly-owned ECE organisation that every child has a right to attend prior to starting school.
The standards we expect ECE services to meet
We expect ECE services to comply at all times with the Education (ECE Services) 2008 Regulations and licensing criteria, and meet the Code of Ethical Conduct for Early Childhood Education Services and the Code of Children's Rights in Early Childcare and Education
Here are some photos from our collection
