New Shoots Children's Centre - Bayfair

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 - Bayfair 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 an outdoor playground. A governance team guides centre operations. A centre director leads a large teaching team. Serving a multicultural community, approximately one-fifth of children enrolled identify as Māori. 

 3 Summary of findings

Children experience a curriculum underpinned by reciprocal relationships with adults that positively uphold their identities as learners. Teachers in the culturally diverse teaching team, and parents, actively share and lead significant celebrations and speak their home languages with children. These experiences guide teaching practices and expand cultural understandings for children and adults. Well-resourced learning environments include a range of resources that reflect children’s diverse cultures. Aspects of te ao Māori (the Māori world) are intentionally integrated into daily curriculum experiences. 

Assessment of children’s learning is increasingly acknowledging children’s home cultures. Teachers’ assessment practices align children’s progress and learning with parent aspirations and the valued outcomes from Te Whāriki, the early childhood curriculum. 

Teachers are developing their understandings around ways to support children’s developing social skills and different ways of learning. Infants and toddlers experience calm, unhurried interactions with their teachers. Children with additional learning needs learn alongside their peers through partnerships with parents and external agencies. Older children’s friendships, communication skills, emergent literacy and understandings of the world around them are well supported. Leaders have identified improving routines for some age groups is needed, to further promote uninterrupted play and positive learning behaviours. 

Systems for improvement are embedded. Teachers’ shared understanding of effective practices are being increased through professional development courses and ongoing mentoring. Evaluation is used to develop strategically identified aspects of the curriculum. A next step is to build leaders’ and teachers’ professional knowledge to identify the impact of changes made, on learning outcomes for individuals and groups of children. 

Effective, improvement-focused governance and management processes include a well-considered strategic plan and relevant systems that intentionally guide improvement across the New Shoots group. Resources are purposefully allocated to achieve identified priorities for children’s learning. Collaborative, targeted, ongoing professional learning builds leaders’ and teachers’ capabilities. Successful initiatives support children to access an inclusive curriculum. 

4 Improvement actions

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

• Develop leaders’ and teachers’ reflective practice to promote consistency in curriculum delivery and better support all children’s decision making, and access to uninterrupted play. 
• Strengthen individual teacher and team-wide internal evaluation by monitoring and documenting the impact of improvement actions on the learning of individuals and groups of children. 

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 service leaders to build teachers’ collective capability and shared understandings of using all aspects of effective evaluation to guide improvement. 

5 Management Assurance on Legal Requirements

Before the review, the staff and management of New Shoots Children’s Centre - Bayfair 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)

 4 June 2024 

6 About the Early Childhood Service