No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited

1 ERO’s Judgements

A Governing Organisation Evaluation evaluates the extent to which organisational conditions support equitable and excellent outcomes for all learners in the organisation’s services. Te Ara Poutama- indicators of quality for early childhood education: what matters most is the basis for making judgements about its effectiveness. The Governing Organisation Quality Evaluation Judgement Rubric derived from the indicators, is used to inform the ERO’s judgements about this organisation’s performance. 

ERO’s judgement for No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited is as follows:

ERO’s judgement Organisational Conditions 

The organisation conditions encompass Ngā Akatoro | Domains of:

• Ngā Aronga Whai Hua | Evaluation for improvement
• Kaihautū | Leadership fosters collaboration and improvement
• Te Whakaruruhau | Stewardship through effective governance and management.

2 Context of the Governing Organisation

No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited provides home-based education and care across Auckland. The privately owned organisation operates three brands – No-1 Homebased Childcare, Kuddles In-Home Childcare and Kia Ora Kids at Home Childcare. The brands share governance, systems, and processes. At the time of this evaluation, all home-based networks were on a full licence. A marketing manager and lead coordinator provide governance, management, and curriculum support to three head visiting teachers, 17 visiting teachers and 12 support staff. Following the acquisition of additional licences, the organisation has been moving through a period of growth and consolidation.

Defined by the organisation as the ‘nurturing place’, education and care occur in either an educator's home or children’s own homes. The owner is the service provider for all licences and holds ultimate responsibility for operations and curriculum. 

Findings from ERO’s evaluation at the governance and organisational level included evaluating the extent to which No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited strategic intentions, quality improvement systems, processes and practices support the provision of a quality curriculum at individual service level. 

3 Summary of findings

Cultural diversity is highly valued. Senior leaders are purposeful in their approach to: 

• Recruitment of diverse educators, visiting teachers and administration staff that reflects families enrolled.
• Provision of intensive support to educators of diverse cultures to succeed in their level four early childhood education studies.
• Translation of a range of internal documents and working closely alongside educators and families that have English as a second language.
• Using a range of communication platforms that support sharing of information and encouraging parent engagement.
• Promoting and building educator bicultural practices.

The organisation has established shared values, visions and a philosophy. Current strategic planning and priorities for improvement are focused on business functionality and accountability. Strategic priorities for children’s learning and wellbeing are not well defined or developed in consultation with parents and whānau Māori. The organisation is yet to monitor progress towards its priorities.

There has been a strong organisation focus on building capability in relation to compliance, accountability and organisation expectations. This has resulted in clearer guidance and growing shared understandings to support ongoing maintenance of regulatory requirements. A reporting process is in place and being refined to enable increased oversight and assurance to senior leaders.

Some key features of working collaboratively that have been introduced include:

• distributed leadership
• building relational trust between management and the senior teacher team 
• a refined appraisal process for visiting teacher professional growth cycle and better support for teachers inquiring into their practices.

Senior leaders are yet to define responsibilities or systematic processes that enable oversight of the quality of visiting teacher practices, curriculum provision or outcomes for groups of children. As a result, the service provider has a limited understanding or information in relation to the quality of education and care provided.

Short and long-term reviews are well established. These reviews are improvement focused and enable visiting teachers to seek perspectives and build educator practices. Findings from these inform learning experiences for children. However, current guidance and processes for internal evaluation are limiting opportunities to:

• understand what is working well, or not and for which learners
• scrutinise and make improvements to visiting teacher and educator practice. 

Once systematic processes for the oversight of the quality of visiting teacher practice and curriculum provision have been established this should provide a foundation for future internal evaluation and planning for professional development for visiting teachers and leaders 

4 Summary of findings from visits to services

ERO visited a sample of 10 services to verify what No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited knows about the quality of each of the services’ learning conditions and to what extent the organisational conditions support service improvement. 

Visiting teachers’ and educators’ practices that promote positive outcomes for children include:

• relationships between visiting teachers, educators and children that support children’s wellbeing and promote educator agency
• use of differentiated strategies to build educator capability and agency to enrich children’s learning experiences
• incorporating culturally valued knowledge, skills and beliefs to promote children’s learning where children and families are from diverse cultures and English is a second language
• visiting teachers consistently implementing the organisation’s expectations during home visits.

The in-home curriculum is responsive to children’s interests, routines and needs. Children’s interests consistently inform visiting teacher and educator planning. Activities are planned to extend their interests and provide a broader range of experiences. 

Assessment practices are highly variable across the networks. Visiting teachers are not yet consistently considering the learning outcomes from Te Whāriki, the early childhood curriculum as the basis of assessment practices or showing children’s increasing capabilities in relation to these. Some parent aspirations are used to inform planning and provision of activities for children.

5 Improvement actions

Prior to the next ERO evaluation No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited will progress the following actions through its Quality Improvement Planning: 

• Strengthen strategic planning to be more focused on children’s learning, desired outcomes and priorities for improvement.
• Increase oversight of the quality of teaching practices, assessment for learning and curriculum delivery and use this information to inform planning for teacher professional learning.
• Build a shared understanding of effective internal evaluation and develop and implement a process that better enables visiting teachers and leaders to do and use evaluation for improvement.

6 Management Assurance on Legal Requirements

As part of this review, a representative of No 1 Homecare Limited and Awa Home Based Childcare Limited completed an ERO Governing Organisation Assurance Statement and Self-Audit Checklist. In these documents they stated that the organisation has the systems, processes, and practices to be assured that service providers for licensed services within the organisation are meeting legal requirements related to:

• curriculum
• premises and facilities
• health and safety practices
• governance, management, and administration.

The licensed service provider/s of the sampled services listed at the end of this report also completed an ERO Assurance Statement and Self-Audit Checklist for their service. In these documents they attested that they have taken all reasonable steps to meet legal requirements, including those detailed in Ministry of Education Circulars and other documents, related to these areas. 

All early childhood services are required to promote children's health and safety and to regularly review their compliance with legal requirements.

7 Actions for Compliance 

During the evaluation, the governing organisation provided ERO with evidence that shows it has addressed the following non-compliances:

• Ensuring the written emergency plan includes a communication plan for families and support services when educators evacuate homes (HS4)
• Ensuring records of written authority from parents for the administration of medicine include the time or specific symptoms/circumstances when medicine is to be given (HS25)

[Licensing Criteria for Early Childhood Education and Care Services, 2008].

During its visits to sample services ERO identified the following non-compliances:

Non-compliances 

8 Next ERO Review

The next ERO review is likely to be in two years.

ERO will visit a different sample of services at that time.

Patricia Davey
Director of Early Childhood Education (ECE)

23 August 2024 

9 About the Governing Organisation 

10 List of sampled services

All sampled services are on a full licence.

Services sampled in this evaluation: