‘ECE has become baby rearing’: survey of early childhood teachers reveals troubling allegations

By John Gerritsen of RNZ

A survey of 4,000 early childhood teachers has revealed troubling allegations of noisy and crowded centers where profits come before the well-being of children.

While three-quarters of those who responded to the Children’s Forum poll supported the quality of the places they worked, a quarter said they couldn’t.

Advocates for teachers and children in early learning told RNZ that the results matched what they were hearing from teachers.

Respondents’ comments addressed issues such as understaffing and insufficient time to dedicate to individual children:

• “They cut many corners to give the appearance of quality care, when in reality it is about generating profits.”
• “I went to relieve myself at a center where I put my son after he went to school and the place was a zoo full of children. I felt really bad for putting my son there.”
• “I have witnessed how poorly children are treated in ECE and I have lost faith in the system and trust in other teachers.”
• “ECE has become baby rearing.”

Susan Bates, who founded the support group for early childhood teachers, the Teachers Advocacy Group, said the comments and survey results matched the complaints she regularly heard from teachers.

Bates said regulations governing the amount of space, noise and number of children in a center were at the center of the problems and urgently needed an update.

“We believe that the psychosocial development of children is being impaired, so all these things that teachers are suffering at the moment are directly related to the environment in which the children are,” he said.

Bates said the results were credible.

“When you have 4,000 respondents, I think you can have some faith in that, and the fact that our results support the Child Forum results can also give some faith,” he said.

Child Forum Executive Director Dr. Sarah Alexander said the results showed that policymakers needed to talk more with teachers.

“Currently, the main source of information for policy and decision-making comes from service providers and it may be time to listen to teachers as well,” he said.

“We don’t really listen to what’s happening behind closed doors.”

Alexander said the teachers’ comments on the survey provided a strong indication that the children were at risk.

Te Rito Maioha represents about 500 early learning centers, and executive director Kathy Wolfe said she was not convinced the results were representative of the more than 30,000 early childhood teachers working in the industry.

He said that teachers should report bad practices when they saw them.

“There will definitely be centers that need to be addressed and usually that goes through the ERO process, but sometimes ERO doesn’t move fast enough and that’s where teachers need to be stronger and voice their concerns about the quality of the services and the curriculum that children receive because it impacts children and that is just unacceptable, “he said.

Wolfe said he was confident that many of the issues raised by respondents would be addressed by the government’s early learning action plan.

Child welfare advocate Dr. Mike Bedford said the survey could suffer from selection bias because respondents chose to participate in the survey, but its results were very consistent between 2014, 2017 and 2020, despite the fact that the number of respondents had quadrupled in the last iteration.

He said that even if the percentage of teachers who would not endorse their own centers were half the number cited by the survey, it would still be cause for alarm.

“What if you said that 12 and a half percent of teachers couldn’t support the quality of their own school? That’s a shocking number.

“So no matter how you look at the survey, it’s a huge flashing red light in the industry and it’s absolutely consistent with the loss of industry teachers, so we’ve got all the signals you need to say ‘we say we have serious problems and we have to fix them, ‘”he said.

Bedford said poor conditions for staff and children at some centers were driving teachers out of the profession.

“Teachers have said ‘I can’t forgive this any longer,’ what they see being done to children on a day-to-day basis. Now what they are doing to children is that they are being forced into situations that they are too crowded with too few teachers, “he said.

He said part of the problem was inadequate regulations for space and the number of teachers.

The Early Childhood Council represents about 1,200 centers, and Executive Director Peter Reynolds said the results showed that the funding system for early learning was not working.

He said the 29 percent of respondents who did not have time to develop individual relationships with children reflected the shortage of early childhood teachers and increased use of pain relievers.

Reynolds noted that the survey showed that the majority of teachers supported the quality of the center they were working in and said that teachers should complain if their centers did not meet the minimum teacher-to-child ratio.

– RNZ