106 Rhinevale Close, Henderson, Auckland
View on mapAkarangi | 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 Sweethome Home - Based Childcare Service are as follows:
Outcome Indicators(What the service knows about outcomes for learners) |
Whakatō Emerging |
Ngā Akatoro Domains |
|
Learning ConditionsOrganisational Conditions |
Whakatō Emerging Whakatō Emerging |
Most children enrolled in this home-based service are of Chinese heritage. There are three registered teachers (coordinators), including the service owner, who also oversees daily operations and administration. Half of the eight educators have an early childhood qualification.
Children are well cared for in their own homes by grandparents. Their identity, culture, and language are key features in the curriculum provided. As a result, children experience a strong sense of belonging. Trust is evident between educators and children, and children know that adults will respond to their needs and preferences.
Educators’ practices demonstrate that care is understood to be an integral part of the curriculum. Infants and toddlers experience meaningful interactions through familiar routines. Older children are involved with a range of play resources inside the home. Coordinators are working with families and educators to include outdoor curriculum experiences as an important part of children’s learning.
Coordinators regularly visit educators’ homes. They complete a monthly report and plan children’s learning experiences. To strengthen these reports, coordinators should include discussions and suggestions about ways to improve educators’ practices. This documentation needs to focus on supporting educators’ own development and growth as facilitators of children’s learning.
A philosophy statement identifies the service’s priorities for learning. It is timely that coordinators, in consultation with educators and parents, review and adapt the philosophy to better reflect the service’s values, beliefs and practices.
Coordinators and educators have positive working relationships. They have opportunities to access professional learning, and educators are supported to complete a relevant qualification.
Coordinators should document decisions made to improve the quality of the service. They are yet to build their collective capability to undertake internal evaluation for improvement. There is no professional growth cycle in place to grow coordinators’ practice. As a result, there is no clear system in place to identify how their work impacts on improving outcomes for children.
Sweethome Home - Based Childcare Service will include the following actions in its Quality Improvement Planning:
Review the service’s philosophy to help the owner, coordinators and educators to enact shared understandings of the service’s priorities and beliefs.
Improve assessment, planning and curriculum evaluation by documenting children’s progress and learning over time.
Establish internal evaluation processes to monitor the impact of improvements on outcomes for all children.
Before the review, the staff and management of Sweethome Home - Based Childcare Service 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.
During the onsite visit, ERO identified the following areas of non-compliance:
Ensuring furniture and equipment that could fall or topple and cause serious injury of damage is secured.
Having a written supervision plan that is specific to the premises and the number, age, abilities and enrolled hours of the children attending and must show how the educator will actively supervise children attending the service. It must include how the premises will be arranged, across all indoor and outdoor spaces likely to be used at any time while children are attending.
Ensuring processes for human resource management include a system of regular appraisal.
[Licensing Criteria for Home-based Education and Care Centres 2008, HS6, HS34, GMA6.]
ERO recommends the Ministry follows up with the service provider to ensure non-compliances identified in this report are addressed.
Filivaifale Jason Swann
Director Review and Improvement Services (Northern)
Northern Region | Te Tai Raki
13 December 2022
|
Early Childhood Service Name |
Sweethome Home - Based Childcare Service |
|
Profile Number |
47241 |
|
Location |
Henderson, Auckland |
|
Service type |
Home - based service |
|
Number licensed for |
80 children, including up to 80 aged under 2 |
|
Service roll |
30 |
|
Review team on site |
October 2022 |
|
Date of this report |
13 December 2022 |
|
Most recent ERO report(s) |
Education Review, September 2019 |
|
Not well placed |
Requires further development |
Well placed |
Very well placed |
Sweethome Home-Based Childcare Service is well placed to promote positive learning outcomes for children.
ERO's findings that support this overall judgement are summarised below.
Sweethome Home-Based Childcare Service has been in operation for two years. Forty educators provide care and education for children in their own or other homes over a wide geographical area. Many educators are closely related to families. Children represent several different cultures.
Over the last two years the service has grown and recently a third coordinator has been added to the team. The service is licensed for 80 children. The qualified coordinators, including the owner of the service, work closely with educators to support their practice. A quarter of the educators hold teaching qualifications from their countries of origin.
The owner manages the service. Educators are supported through professional development opportunities and visits from the coordinators. Policies and procedures have been developed and shared to guide coordinators and educators in their work with children.
Children attending Sweethome Home-Based Childcare are very well cared for, many in their own homes by grandparents. Children's cultural identity and home languages are supported and nurtured. Photographic records of children's learning show engaged, settled children taking part in a wide variety of activities and experiences. The service provides a toy library, supply of books and resources assist educators to provide meaningful learning experiences.
Coordinators make regular visits to observe programmes in action and to provide ongoing support and guidance for educators. As a result, programmes for children are based on their interests and strengths. Group excursions add significantly to positive learning outcomes for children. Parent/whānau involvement in organised outings, or family events, contributes to these positive outcomes and creates links to the wider community for children.
The philosophy for the service is focused on the quality of provision provided for children. The philosophy includes information about three educational influences, including Te Whāriki, the early childhood curriculum, Reggio Emilia, an environmental approach to supporting children's creativity and independence, and the teachings of Emmi Pikler about the care of infants and toddlers. All of these approaches to teaching and learning include a strong focus on respect for children.
Educators engage in respectful relationships with children in their care, in accordance with the philosophy. Coordinators work steadily with educators to increase opportunities for children up to two years of age to explore and make sense of their world. Educators who have often kept infants close, are beginning to let them have opportunities to be more independent. Careful transitions into this service and on to other childcare services, and to school, are well managed.
The owner and coordinators regularly gather information about parents'/whānau aspirations for their children's education and care. These aspirations are recorded in children's portfolios and are incorporated into individual learning plans developed by educators and coordinators. The quality of these plans is improving with the support of coordinators. Plans are shared with parents/whānau who value the opportunity to contribute.
The service owner and coordinators place a strong focus on supporting educators to understand and use te reo Māori with children. Educators are enthusiastic about learning te reo Māori. Celebrations of te ao Māori help to strengthen this start to a bicultural curriculum.
Effective communication with families supports the development of partnerships. The service owner has created an open and encouraging culture within the coordinator team, with educators and families. She is committed to supporting educators to seek further training in order to more clearly understand Te Whāriki.
Coordinators are well supported by the owner to undertake their work through a sound induction process and ongoing professional development. They stay up-to-date with quality early childhood education practices. All educators can access support from coordinators for ongoing learning and the owner provides regular training opportunities.
Internal evaluation is established and is continuing to develop. Goals and priorities have been set to guide these processes. Coordinators and educators undertake regular safety checks to meet licensing requirements.
The owner and coordinators agree that key next steps include:
supporting educators to understand and embed assessment, planning and evaluation processes using Te Whāriki as a guiding document
incorporating Māori concepts, language and values into learning experiences
supporting educators' understanding of current good practice in relation to children up to two years of age
strengthening internal evaluation processes with coordinators and educators across the service.
Before the review, the staff and management of Sweethome Home-Based Childcare Service completed an ERO Home-based Education and Care 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:
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; police vetting; teacher registration; ratios)
evacuation procedures and practices for fire and earthquake.
All early childhood services are required to promote children's health and safety and to regularly review their compliance with legal requirements.
Steve Tanner
Director Review and Improvement Services Northern
Northern Region
9 September 2019
The Education Review Office (ERO) is the government department that, as part of its work, reviews early childhood services throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. ERO’s reports provide information for parents and communities about each service’s strengths and next steps for development. ERO’s bicultural evaluation framework Ngā Pou Here is described in SECTION 3 of this report. Early childhood services are partners in the review process and are expected to make use of the review findings to enhance children's wellbeing and learning.
|
Location |
Henderson, Auckland |
||
|
Ministry of Education profile number |
47241 |
||
|
Institution type |
Homebased Network |
||
|
Licensed under |
Education (Early Childhood Services) Regulations 2008 |
||
|
Number licensed for |
80 children, including up to 70 aged under 2 |
||
|
Service roll |
81 |
||
|
Standard or Quality Funded |
Standard |
||
|
Gender composition |
Boys 41 Girls 40 |
||
|
Ethnic composition |
NZ European/Pākehā |
6 |
|
|
Number of qualified coordinators in the network |
3 |
||
|
Required ratios of staff educators to children |
Under 2 |
1:2 |
|
|
Over 2 |
1:4 |
||
|
Review team on site |
August 2019 |
||
|
Date of this report |
9 September 2019 |
||
|
Most recent ERO report(s)
|
No previous ERO reports |
||
ERO’s overarching question for an early childhood education review is ‘How well placed is this service to promote positive learning outcomes for children?’ ERO focuses on the following factors as described in the bicultural framework Ngā Pou Here:
Pou Whakahaere – how the service determines its vision, philosophy and direction to ensure positive outcomes for children
Pou Ārahi – how leadership is enacted to enhance positive outcomes for children
Mātauranga – whose knowledge is valued and how the curriculum is designed to achieve positive outcomes for children
Tikanga whakaako – how approaches to teaching and learning respond to diversity and support positive outcomes for children.
Within these areas ERO considers the effectiveness of arotake – self review and of whanaungatanga – partnerships with parents and whānau.
ERO evaluates how well placed a service is to sustain good practice and make ongoing improvements for the benefit of all children at the service.
A focus for the government is that all children, especially priority learners, have an opportunity to benefit from quality early childhood education. ERO will report on how well each service promotes positive outcomes for all children, with a focus on children who are Māori, Pacific, have diverse needs, and are up to the age of two.
For more information about the framework and Ngā Pou Here refer to the draft methodology for ERO reviews in Home-based Education and Care Services: July 2014
The overall judgement that ERO makes will depend on how well the service promotes positive learning outcomes for children. The categories are:
Very well placed
Well placed
Requires further development
Not well placed
ERO has developed criteria for each category. These are available on ERO’s website.
ERO reviews are tailored to each service’s context and performance, within the overarching review framework. The aim is to provide information on aspects that are central to positive outcomes for children and useful to the service.