Abstract

By innovating, individuals and organisations involved in early childhood education learn to do better and to remain relevant to the changing needs and aspirations of their communities. To move from a good early childhood education system to a great one, we must all play a part in promoting, supporting and disseminating innovation that is forward-focused and excellence-driven. Overall policy settings for early childhood education need to harness the skills, expertise and enthusiasm of all members of this diverse sector to improve early childhood education quality. Current policy settings are not sufficiently ‘innovation-friendly’ and much more could be done to encourage and acknowledge people and services in seeking to do things in new and better ways. We propose promoting a cultural change in designing and delivering early childhood education. Suitable incentives must exist for change leaders to identify an issue; develop ideas; propose a solution or response; get ‘buy in’ for action; and gather support for trialling the innovation. Early childhood education policy settings must also ensure that the value of each innovation is objectively assessed; and – where agreed to be successful – it is effectively shared and implemented in suitable settings. Early childhood education innovation policy should encourage and promote innovation in all areas of early childhood education. Successful innovations need to be appropriately acknowledged; and along with this, there needs to be adequate funding for evaluating innovations, and supporting their effective dissemination across the sector. Our proposals for funding innovation are likely to cost in the vicinity of $1.3m: a sound investment in improving the quality of early childhood education.

Recommendations

The ECE Taskforce recommends:

61. establishment of a new, high-quality early childhood education innovation scheme

62. the systematic evaluation of any innovation set up under this funding, to ensure robustness of any new methodologies and ways of working

63. successful innovation in early childhood education is promoted through approving a set of national awards for excellence in early childhood education

64. reporting, every two years, on how policies in early childhood education are minimising or eliminating barriers to innovation

65. further exploration of innovative early childhood education delivery methods, for example, web-based, mobile technology, or distance learning methods for rural and isolated communities.

Introduction

New Zealand is currently a world leader in early childhood education service design and delivery. Our early childhood education system reflects our nation’s educational needs and aspirations, and is based on Treaty of Waitangi principles. It is essential that our early childhood education sector has the incentives both to find what works best and to share this across the sector. While we are part of a global community, we cannot be dependent on overseas ideas and practices to guide the advancement of our early childhood education sector. We need to value and acknowledge early childhood education innovation as it occurs in localised settings or situations across the country.

We define innovation as “the successful introduction into an applied situation of means or ends that are new to that situation”[1]. This means knowing what works and why: what is essential and what isn’t, how to learn from failure, and how to close the gaps often found between knowledge and action[2].

Competing demands for limited government funds highlight the importance of continuously seeking ways to increase the value obtained from public expenditure. Across all areas of government spending – not just on early childhood education – efforts must be made to achieve more for every dollar spent.

Innovation is central to the continuous improvement of quality and excellence in early childhood education in New Zealand. Fostering innovation promotes higher-level thinking, encourages people to envisage new possibilities, and fosters a culture of ongoing improvement. Innovation happens when people (e.g. parents, teachers) and centres feel that their experience and expertise are valued, and their commitment to achieving quality and excellence is acknowledged.

In the Taskforce’s view, many types of innovation could support continuous improvement of existing early childhood education services – including their design, delivery and management. Equally importantly, given the lack of access to suitable early childhood education in some parts of the country, innovation could lead to the development of new services for those that currently face difficulties accessing suitable services.

One submitter said, ‘The early childhood years are crucial for children’s learning and development. International research evidence shows that early childhood education can be of significant value in these years. Although there is much to be admired in current early childhood education policy and practices in New Zealand, it is also timely to evaluate what can be improved.’

A supportive environment, both for successful innovation and its subsequent dissemination, is essential for quality early childhood education to flourish.

Relevant Policy Design Principles

Several of our policy design principles are relevant to this discussion of innovation. They are:

• promote innovation across the sector
• promote economic growth
• ensure efficient use of government funds
• encourage cultural diversity
• allow access for all, and
• encourage sector collaboration.

Background

Individuals, communities and governments all have roles in fostering innovation. Here we focus on what government and the early childhood education sector can do. Government has the potential to be a facilitator of early childhood education innovation. Government must make innovation easier, and worthwhile, for the early childhood education sector to undertake.

Government can help remove barriers to innovation (such as may arise from overly-prescriptive regulations or funding rules); provide support for undertaking and promulgating successful innovations; and acknowledge innovation.

Besides encouraging innovation, the Government needs meanwhile, to ensure children’s safety, through suitable required standards; assure the effectiveness of public spending through evidence-based policy making; and evaluate innovations through methodologically rigorous evaluation and continuous monitoring. This suggests that only a small number of innovations should be supported by government – say, a maximum of ten projects at any one time, nationwide.

The key role of the early childhood education sector is to harness the enthusiasm, creativity, and innovation that exists in so many services around the country, and step up to the challenge of making continuous improvement an accepted part of early childhood education delivery. This lies at the core of a required culture change across the sector; making innovation an acknowledged, valued and recognised activity.

Change leaders

Innovation is typically driven by ‘change leaders’ at the local level. Policy settings must allow communities to take ownership of the innovation process, and encourage and support change leaders to take action from within early childhood education services. Change leaders must be well informed, and able to define problems clearly; bring appropriate evidence to bear; retain objectivity; and, above all, be committed to improving early childhood education quality.

Government can help change leadership by offering leadership and other support. For example, by offering more professional development focused on innovation, and supporting service management and governance while innovation is underway.

Government leadership

Government has a lead role to play in influencing the amount of innovation that occurs and how successfully resulting ‘good practices’ are promulgated across the sector.

In his classic work on innovation, Mohr found that:

Innovation is directly related to the motivation to innovate, inversely related to the strength of obstacles to innovation, and directly related to the availability of resources for overcoming such obstacles.[3]

International evidence tells us that the actions of decentralised individuals and organisations cannot be solely relied on to disseminate innovations effectively. This is not necessarily related to the characteristics of the particular innovation, but is more likely to be related to factors within the innovative organisation, and in the community where the organisation is located. Government can play a role in providing communication channels across the sector; and connecting up services with each other; and helping to get ‘buy in’ for innovations[4].

These insights can be applied to the New Zealand early childhood education sector. They suggest we need policies that increase the incentives for, and reduce barriers to, innovating. Within the heavily taxpayer-subsidised early childhood education sector there are key roles for individuals, communities and government to play, because each can contribute to doing ‘new’ and ‘better’ things, without necessarily incurring new costs.

Innovation-friendly policy

Innovation in local practice needs to be balanced with the need to maintain the nationwide quality and safety requirements that are essential for children’s well-being.

Regulations must ensure minimum standards can be maintained while at the same time enabling people and services to do things differently where these initiatives are likely to achieve better results – that is, result in higher quality, or better value, early childhood education. Some requirements, like New Zealand’s early childhood education curriculum, Te Whāriki, are very supportive of innovation.

Funding and other practical support need to be available to encourage the process of innovating. But some other requirements directly or indirectly inhibit innovation. For example, complying with the staff hour count is likely to discourage innovation because of time used in ‘form filling’ and through the value of time spent in innovation-related work not being recognised. Funding system requirements can also make services behave too cautiously, in our view, neglecting opportunities for making service improvements. Innovation takes time and energy, so for services to be able to allow this to happen, some acknowledged respite from compliance and administrative duties, and funded non-contact time, is essential.

Evaluations of innovations need to be carried out through rigorous and sound research processes. Each assessment needs to be positively focused – in the sense of the evaluators being critical friends; that is, professionals who are focused on identifying and proposing improved ways of doing things rather than taking a pass-fail approach to the work of the innovators.

The ECE sector

The early childhood education sector is generally very interested in furthering its understanding of what practices are successful, and, in particular, we believe it values and encourages peer-to-peer learning.

There are competitive pressures in the early childhood education sector so we need to ensure innovators are supported to share their good ideas and practices. Government can do this by acknowledging innovation in a variety of ways, such as through recognition awards or by making other benefits or resources available.

This view was strongly supported by submissions, many of which called for reinstatement of the former Centres of Innovation programme[5].

Some innovation areas

Examples of the areas where the sector considers innovation is possible, and needed, include developing:

• services that better meet communities’ needs
• services that engage families more intensively with their children’s learning
• services that better promote children’s learning and development
• services that connect and integrate different types of early childhood education provision e.g. sessional, full-day and home-based services
• services at hours that suit working families, including overnight. (See Essay 8: Supporting Parental Engagement in Paid Work)
• ways of improving quality that do not increase costs
• new dissemination methods, using (say) modern technology – the Web, mobile technology, etc
• better ways of enabling learning for children from diverse backgrounds.

Submissions Summary

Many submissions strongly supported the discontinued Centres of Innovation[6] programme.

One submitter said, ‘The now disestablished Centres of Innovation programme had an astonishingly powerful impact on the early childhood education sector – providing research and development that filled knowledge gaps, provoking new thinking and critical debate about early childhood education teaching, stimulating services to aspire to greater heights and creating a new cohort of educational leaders in a few short years. Their reputations quickly spread overseas, adding to New Zealand’s education export income. A replacement programme is needed to stimulate similar outcomes. My recommendation is for government to provide seeding grants for one or more universities to develop a postgraduate early childhood education programme linked to some innovative early childhood education services. A useful model could be something like the Stockholm model[7].’

Proposed Policy Direction

Government encouragement of innovative practices by the early childhood education sector will increase the supply of quality early childhood education that meets local community needs. Changed policy settings and initiatives should promote, recognise and acknowledge innovative practices in early childhood education service delivery, and support their diffusion, adoption and adaptation. Strategies include:

• policy settings that maintain minimum standards for health, safety and fiscal prudence while minimising barriers to innovation
• initiatives that:– support a broad focus on innovation in all areas of early childhood education service delivery providing sufficient support for both the innovation (e.g. noncontact time) and diffusion (e.g. support for creating DVDs or other products)

  – support development of new communication channels allowing for the broad
  diffusion and adoption of innovative ideas across the sector e.g. a ‘brains trust’ sharing new ideas; websites; workshops; professional development sessions based on peer-to-peer learning on site that effectively close ‘knowing-doing’ gaps; publications and other resources documenting the innovations

• incentives for innovating and sharing results, such as a national award for excellence in early childhood education service development and delivery
• evaluation that is supported through a new dedicated fund for carrying out high-quality research and evaluations of innovations to ensure the safety and robustness of the innovation. (See Essay 9: Improving Licensing Processes and Performance Reporting).

Anticipated Outcomes of the Policy Change

If adopted, the policy changes we recommend would:

• promote innovation across the sector through creating a culture of seeking new and better ways of doing things (innovating) and sharing these practices (diffusion), and supporting the development of ‘change leaders’
• promote economic growth through improved efficiencies in the design, delivery and management of early childhood education services and reducing fiscal costs
• ensure efficient use of government funds through more cost-effective use of public resources; more early childhood education services, and early childhood education services that are better matched to contemporary community needs
• encourage cultural diversity through increasing participation in early childhood education by currently under-participating groups (Māori, Pasifika and children of lower socio-economic status); also this recognises that bicultural education is a right of citizenship
• encourage sector collaboration through demonstrating the benefits of sharing innovations to improve service and financial performance
• support access for all by increasing the supply, quality and diversity of early childhood education services, including those for children with special educational needs.

Cost Considerations

Many of the policy proposals presented here involve refocusing and reshaping existing policies. As such they should be largely cost-neutral. Reporting on regulatory barriers to innovation can be achieved within the business-as-usual activity of the Ministry of Education. Additional costs may arise from increased evaluation effort and payments associated with developing and implementing innovations and disseminating the resulting methodologies. These are likely to be in the vicinity of $1.3m per annum. We consider expenditure on innovation to be a sound government investment. In terms of investigating innovative ways to deliver early childhood education, no immediate expenditure is recommended until the benefits are fully investigated.

The Change Process

A more detailed discussion of the phases and rationale for phasing referred to in this section can be found in Part One under Leading Change Processes.

Many of the recommendations of this essay are core to the programme of research and information gathering that underpins many of the other essays. These should be established relatively quickly, during phase one in order to interact with, and inform, other initiatives taking place.

Successful innovation initiatives will help inform the ongoing design cycle of many of the other initiatives recommended in this report.

References

1. Mohr, L. B. (1969). Determinants of Innovation in Organisations. The American Political Science Review, 63(1), 111-126, p112. Other key sources for this chapter are Mintrom, M. (2001). Policy Design for Local Innovation: The Effects of Competition in Public Schooling. State Politics and Policy Quarterly, 1(4), 343-363, Goldsmith, S., Georges, G., and Burke, T.G. (2010). The power of social innovation: How civic entrepreneurs ignite community networks for good. San Francisco, USA: Jossey-Bass, and Rogers, E.M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.

2. Pfeffer, J. & Sutton, R. (2000). The Knowing- Doing Gap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

3. Mohr, L. B. (1969). Determinants of Innovation in Organisations. The American Political Review, 63(1), 111-126, p114.

4. Fullan, M. (2008). The Six Secrets of Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

5. More information about this programme is available at “http://www.educate.ece.govt.nz/” http://www.educate.ece.govt.nz/ Programmes/CentresOfInnovation.aspx.

6. Centres of Innovation (COI) programme operated from 2003-2009 and promoted innovative teaching and learning in early childhood education. COI services were provided with support and funding for three years to promote innovative practice; improve teaching and learning processes; and support the effective implementation of Te Whāriki.

7. For an explanation of the Stockholm model, see Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (1999). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care. London: Falmer Press.