New Shoots Childrens Centre - The Lakes

1 ERO’s Judgements

Akarangi | Quality Evaluation evaluates the extent to which this early childhood service has the learning and organisational conditions to support equitable and excellent outcomes for all learners. Te Ara Poutama Indicators of quality for early childhood education: what matters most are the basis for making judgements about the effectiveness of the service in achieving equity and excellence for all learners. Judgements are made in relation to the Outcomes Indicators, Learning and Organisational Conditions. The Evaluation Judgement Rubric derived from the indicators, is used to inform ERO’s judgements about this service’s performance in promoting equity and excellence. 

ERO’s judgements for New Shoots Children’s Centre -The Lakes are as follows:

2 Context of the Service

This service is part of the New Shoots Children’s Centre Group. Children play and learn in one of five rooms, sharing the outdoor playground. A governance team guides centre operations. A centre director leads the large teaching team. A small number of enrolled children identify as Māori. Children from a diverse range of ethnicities also attend. 

3 Summary of findings

Children have respectful relationships with each other and their teachers within the well-resourced learning-based play environments. Infants and toddlers experience a curriculum that promotes calm, unhurried care routines and interactions with teachers who know them well.

Children with additional needs are well supported to achieve their individual goals through partnership with parents and external specialists.

Children have many opportunities to lead their own learning. They hear and experience some te reo Māori and aspects of tikanga Māori through the curriculum. Leaders have identified that further developing the local bicultural curriculum continues to be an area for growth. They are yet to consistently include other children’s languages, cultures and identities in the centre’s environments and learning documentation.

Leaders and teachers have built trusting relationships based on collective responsibility for children’s wellbeing and learning. They intentionally place children and whānau at the centre of decision making. Internal evaluation systems are becoming established in centre practices. However, more work is needed to build shared understandings about the purpose and processes of internal evaluation.

Strongly improvement-focused governance and management implement a well-considered strategic plan and relevant systems that intentionally guide the organisation. They purposefully allocate resources that clearly align with achieving centrepriorities for children’s learning. Collaborative targeted ongoing professional learning builds leadership and teachers’ capabilities. Successful initiatives support children to access the inclusive curriculum.  

4 Improvement actions

New Shoots Children’s Centre - The Lakes will include the following actions in its Quality Improvement Planning:

• Continue to develop the bicultural curriculum in partnership with whānau Māori. 
• Develop meaningful ways to integrate the cultural identities of individual children and their whānau throughout the curriculum and learning documentation.

The New Shoots governance group has indicated it will include the following in its Quality Improvement Planning, to ensure that all services are working at a consistent level:

• Provide support for centre leaders to build teachers’ collective capability and shared understanding of using all aspects of evaluation for improvement.

5 Management Assurance on Legal Requirements

Before the review, the staff and management of New Shoots Children’s Centre -The Lakes completed an ERO Assurance Statement and Self-Audit Checklist. In these documents they attested that they have taken all reasonable steps to meet their legal obligations related to:

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

During the review, ERO looked at the service’s systems for managing the following areas that have a potentially high impact on children's wellbeing:

• emotional safety (including positive guidance and child protection)
• physical safety (including supervision; sleep procedures; accidents; medication; hygiene; excursion policies and procedures)
• suitable staffing (including qualification levels; safety checking; teacher registration; ratios)
• relevant evacuation procedures and practices.

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

Patricia Davey
Director of Early Childhood Education (ECE)

7 March 2024 

6 About the Early Childhood Service