ECE teacher: ‘There was only silence’ from the Ministry of Education on fears of child abuse in daycare

By Charlotte Cook of RNZ

A teacher who denounced an early childhood center for punishing young children by isolating them or forcing them to sit on a mat for hours fears that the abuse will continue.

The woman complained about the Waikato preschool four years ago and heard nothing from the Education Ministry about the investigation until the RNZ made inquiries last week.

The ministry said it investigated and found nothing wrong, but the teacher said officials didn’t look hard enough and she was concerned about the children who were still there.

For four years he thought about the children he taught in downtown Waikato in 2017 and the complaint he felt was never heard.

The academic and fully qualified early childhood teacher did not stay long due to the control and restraint techniques she said were used as punishment for misbehavior.

The woman said it was common practice for children to be flushed unsupervised for more than 20 minutes if they used “toilet words,” words like poop or boom.

“I remember that they had put a child in the toilet and they had just forgotten it and when I went to see how he was on my own, I saw that he was swinging from the bars and he could have had an accident. Other things that what would happen would be to catch children by the arms and pull them.

“I remember a case where a child was pulled by the arm and dragged across a shelf and hit his head on the shelf.”

He recalled a child who was forced to sit on a mat for three hours, crying all the time, and others were not helped to dress or go to the bathroom.

The teacher said that many of the behavior management techniques bothered her and she refused to use them because they were illegal.

“I totally believe that it was an unsafe environment for children at the level of their emotional development.

“I was concerned about their physical safety when it came to pulling them by the arms.

“I once saw a teacher pick a kid up and force him onto his butt, and you know, he just picks him up out of sheer frustration and just lowers him down pretty hard.”

She complained directly to the management of the center, but resigned because she felt very unsafe at work.

‘The system is not working’

The woman then contacted the Ministry of Education. He had a meeting to discuss his concerns but there was no follow-up.

“They seemed to take it seriously and then I didn’t hear anything else, there was just this silence.

“I went and followed him and they said they would answer me, but they never did.

“So he feels powerless to address the concerns. The system is not working.”

After RNZ asked questions about the complaint, officials offered the teacher another meeting.

In a statement, Undersecretary Katrina Casey said the complaint was investigated but not confirmed.

“We conducted an unannounced service visit on February 14, 2017. We did not find any violations of licensing regulations or evidence to support concerns.

“We have no record of us going back to [the complainant] and update her on the result of our research as is our usual practice.

“We also have no recorded correspondence or investigative notes on his concerns for his safety, so I cannot say if this was ever investigated.”

Casey said there were no other complaints about the center other than a labor issue in 2018.

The teacher was not impressed by the answer.

“I was surprised that they had made an unannounced visit to the center and felt that on that basis they could dismiss all my complaints.

“I felt that my accusations were quite serious and that they needed a response to match that.”

He said that the staff would not have misbehaved in front of the ministry staff and thought that the children still at the center could be in danger.

“I felt almost in a way very guilty that I had left the center and that the children were still being subjected to the kind of treatment they were experiencing.

“I really felt quite depressed not only from losing my job, but also from the fact that I was no longer there for those kids.”

The woman is not the only former teacher who is disappointed in the ministry.

Teachers and parents at a Feilding child care center said the ministry made it difficult to complain to the owner, who has allegedly abused children for years.

The ministry’s complaint process would forward all complaints directly to the owner of the Pitter Patter Education Center.

The center is currently under investigation and its license was suspended for three weeks in November after complaints that young children were being beaten, locked in rooms as punishment and fed moldy food.

25 complaints in a week

Teacher Advocacy Group founder Susan Bates said the processes have improved over the years, but teachers still don’t trust the ministry.

“Certainly the number of complaints that have come in and the teachers that come to me are too afraid to go to the ministry or they don’t trust the ministry to do the job, and they are also afraid of the repercussions in their workplaces.

“So not much later.”

Bates said he typically receives about 30 complaints from teachers a month, but just last week he had 25.

“We want to see safe reporting. We want teachers to have the effectiveness to do it. We want them to have an organization that supports and protects them while they do it.

“We need much more communication with the ministry. It seems there is less and no more.

“I don’t know the answer, I just know that children are not in safe places.”

Bates relays many of the anonymous complaints to the ministry, but believes that more people are not speaking out at all for fear of repercussions.

– RNZ