What troubles early childhood educators in New Zealand: a 20-year cross-sectional study of ethical difficulties in early childhood practice

Abstract

For more than 20 years, the New Zealand early childhood (EC) sector has had guidance about how to deal with situations of ethical difficulty in daily practice through the ECE Code of Ethics. This paper reports on three surveys undertaken at 10-year intervals that sought to understand EC educators’ experiences of such situations, and how they addressed them within their EC settings. An analysis of educators’ stories of ethically troubling situations from the three data-sets traced shifts and similarities in the content reported, and in how educators responded to these challenges over the two-decade period. We situate this analysis alongside changes in the New Zealand ECE policy context during the same time frame. We argue that a connection exists between the reported situations and teachers’ responses to them, and changes within the policy and professional context of daily EC practice.

Keywords:

• Code of ethics
• ethical situations
• early childhood practice
• early childhood policy

Notes

1. EC services are licensed as teacher-led (kindergarten, education and care, home-based), whānau-led (Te Kōhanga Reo) or parent-led (playcentre). In this article, the terms ‘teacher’, ‘educator’ and ‘practitioner’ are used interchangeably.

2. For each survey, the stratified random sample of licensed EC services was developed using Ministry of Education databases, designed to reflect the proportionality of licensed service types across the country. In the 1994 study, we included home-based services within the education and care sample but, due to the significant growth in the sector and shifts in licensing requirements, we separated out the home-based from the education and care settings in both the 2004 and 2015 surveys. Whilst Te Kōhanga Reo were included in the sample for the 1994 and 2004 surveys, we omitted this service type from the 2015 sample, as the National Kōhanga Reo Trust had positioned Kōhanga reo as focused on whnau development rather than as EC services and response rates to both previous surveys from Kōhanga Reo had been extremely low.

3. The second author has been employed at Victoria University of Wellington throughout the period covering the three surveys whilst the first author has been employed since 2005.

4. Child, Youth and Family (CYF) is the NZ government agency charged with the protection of children. Over the 20 years that these data span, it has been known by several names and acronyms (including CYF and CYPS).