Pioneers Elm Row

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 Pioneers Elm Row are as follows:

2 Context of the Service

Pioneers Elm Row is one of five services owned by a charitable trust known as the Dunedin Community Childcare Association, operating as Pioneers. A governance board of elected parents oversees the work of Pioneers. The new director has overall responsibility for the operation and professional leadership of the association.

This centre has an increasingly diverse learning community and is licensed as a mixed-age service. A small number of tamariki Māori attend. Almost all staff are qualified early childhood teachers. Good progress has been made with addressing the areas identified in the 2022 ERO review.

3 Summary of findings

Children play and learn in deliberately planned and well-resourced environments. Teachers intentionally foster children’s interests and capabilities, and caringly support them to build a strong sense of wellbeing. Pioneers’ services are taking a planned approach to further developing and embedding the enacted bicultural curriculum.

Infants and toddlers experience nurturing, unhurried interactions with attentive teachers who use daily transitions and routines as learning opportunities. They often play with, and alongside, older children in the various learning areas.

The centre’s learning priorities form the basis of group planning, which includes regular, planned visits and walks in the local community. Evaluation of learning and teaching is yet to be fully implemented, and refining assessment, planning and evaluation processes is ongoing. Children are not yet able to independently revisit their learning records while at the centre.

Leaders and teachers have established, and are beginning to embed, the organisational conditions that enable collaboration for improvement. They promote distributed leadership opportunities and use a systematic approach to internal evaluation. They are yet to consistently monitor and evaluate changes made on outcomes for children and to report an overview of these to the board.

Those responsible for governance and management:

• develop policies and procedures that are fit for purpose, guide inclusive practice across the association and make explicit the expectations of leaders, teachers and staff

• allocate resources that place children and whānau at the centre of decision making

• promote a positive working environment that facilitates low turnover of staff

• are at the early stages of implementing their ongoing learning to enact the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by recognising Māori as tangata whenua and engaging in treaty-based practices.

4 Improvement actions

Pioneers Elm Row will include the following actions in its Quality Improvement Planning:

• Continue to develop and embed the enacted bicultural curriculum that recognises the significance of mana whenua.

• Further develop and streamline assessment, planning and evaluation processes and practices to clearly show the progress of children’s learning over time against the learning outcomes from Te Whāriki, the early childhood curriculum.

• Explore and implement ways that children can independently access their own learning records while at the centre.

• Ensure reporting to the board regularly provides an overview of outcomes from internal evaluation for groups of children, and all children.

5 Management Assurance on Legal Requirements

Before the review, the staff and management of Pioneers Elm Row 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)

20 September 2023 

​​​​​​​6 About the Early Childhood Service