Should anyone be thinking that the Ministry’s early learning regulatory advisory group has influence and was formed to provide an excellent mix of expertise and representation of different stakeholder interests then here is what you need to know.

Three meetings of the Ministry of Education’s Regulatory Review Advisory Group have been held so far.

Meeting Number 1 – a zoom meeting
Date: Thursday 27 August 2020, 9.30am-10:45am
What happened:  Ministry staff introduced and talked in broad terms about the changes the ministry wanted to make to the regulations and how the review would be structured

Meeting number 2 – a zoom meeting
Date:  Thursday 5 November 2020, 1.00pm-2:30pm
What happened:  Ministry staff presented the wording for the regulation changes it wanted to make in its first round of the regulatory review. The main purpose of the meeting was for the Ministry to educate members on the actual changes it wanted to make and check out if its framing of the proposals was adequate to take out for consultation.

Meeting number 3 - a zoom meeting
Date:  10^th March 2021
What happened:  Ministry staff presented a summary of feedback from its consultation and explained its decisions on the final form of each of the proposed regulation changes.  A low response to the call for feedback was received by the Ministry - just 256 survey responses and 16 submissions (note that more than one submission and survey response may be from the same people or groups).

Moving on quickly to Tranche 2 of the Regulations Review - Meeting number 4 is scheduled for 7^th April 2021. 
The Ministry is funding the costs of travel/accommodation for its out-of-town advisory group members to meet at its Wellington office building.
The meeting will take the form of discussion of the next round of the regulatory review and a workshop on network planning.
Network planning is being proposed by the Ministry to give it greater powers to determine who can set up a new ECE service and where, and to shape the ECE market by way of consolidating existing ECE services.  This may be to bring single and small groups of services together into a new entity or to join an existing large organisation, and for existing large organisations to grow their empire. We’ll see if lots of small services and their local communities are directly involved in the early conversations. 

 

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE TO READ

- Membership of the Regulatory Advisory Group

- Review of the Education (ECE Services) Regulations (Tranche 1 proposals) 

 

Last updated 11 March 2021