Appendix 4: Acknowledgements
As Chair of the Taskforce on Early Childhood Education, I wish first to acknowledge the contributions of my eight Taskforce colleagues. My heartiest thanks go to Tanya Harvey, Claire Johnstone, Professor Richie Poulton, Peter Reynolds, Professor Anne Smith, Aroaro Tamati, Laurayne Tafa, and Ron Viviani. Each one of them is a great New Zealander. From start to finish, they showed a collective passion for promoting the well-being of New Zealand’s youngest citizens. They deliberated, debated, and wrote together in ways that allowed both for respectful disagreement and for reconciliation of divergent views. While diverse in terms of their life experiences and backgrounds, the Taskforce members consistently displayed high trust towards one another and a big appetite for hard work. Their professionalism and creativity were inspiring. As our work progressed, it became obvious that all of them were participating as a service to New Zealand. They desired to leave a positive, empowering legacy for our youngest citizens and those not yet born.
All of us, as members of the Taskforce, conducted our work together while continuing full-time in our regular professional activities. In practice, this meant that for a period of more than six months we all did a considerable amount of additional evening and weekend work, and frequently rearranged our work weeks to accommodate our regular meetings and other Taskforce-related activities. We often travelled out of town. For their unending encouragement, support, and patience, we wish to express our gratitude to our family members and colleagues. We recognise the pressures and disruptions that our work caused those around us and appreciate their forbearance.
We offer our thanks to the Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, and her Cabinet colleagues, especially Minister of Finance, Bill English, and Prime Minister John Key for having established this independent Taskforce. Rather than rely on traditional sources of policy advice, they invited us as a diverse group of individuals to offer our views on the future directions of early childhood education in New Zealand. That was a far-sighted and bold decision. They might find it hard to concur with everything we have recommended, but we know that they will seriously consider our advice, and we wish to thank them for their openness to unlikely messages.
We wish to express our deepest appreciation to members of the Taskforce Secretariat, led by Richard Walley. The Secretariat brought incredible energy, intelligence, and passion to their work. Among other things, they developed background briefing papers for us and, with our guidance and input, drafted the eleven essays on policy design. They also undertook extensive financial analysis and coordinated our many meetings. In addition, the Secretariat responded enthusiastically to our ideas on how to move beyond business-as-usual methods of policy advising.
We wish to thank the many individuals and organisations who provided submissions and who made time to meet with us. We know parents of young children and people who work in the early childhood education sector have little time and energy to comment on government policies. We appreciate their efforts. This should be obvious from the extensive references made to the submissions throughout our report. We also acknowledge the hospitality shown to us by people in the organisations and centres we visited on field trips as part of our Taskforce work.
Thanks are due to our peer reviewers. We received many excellent comments and suggestions from Professor Brenda Bushouse (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Professor Gøsta Esping-Andersen (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Howard Fancy (Motu Economic and Policy Research), Dr. Shahrashoub Razavi (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development), and senior officials in the Ministry of Education. As Taskforce Chair, I accept full responsibility for any remaining errors or omissions in our final report.
Dr. Michael Mintrom
Chair
Taskforce on Early Childhood Education
June 2011
