Kia ora from Aotearoa New Zealand

The next move was to work independently for 5 years undertaking evaluation projects, mainly for social services, before joining the early childhood initial teacher education team at the College of Education The policy expectations around early childhood education are ‘higher’ because of the first Early Childhood Education (ECE) Strategic Plan (Ministry of Education, 2002) presented nearly 20 years earlier by a previous Labour-led coalition government that set out quite explicit goals across a 10-year time frame Despite these expectations, the government did not set dates for achieving each identified goal and instead used the terms short, medium and long term within the Draft Early Learning Strategy The COVID-19 crisis created the opportunity to do away with the Budget Responsibility Rules that the government had set for itself, by referring to the ‘Rainy Day’ opt-out clause in order to ‘weather the global storm’ (Robertson, 2020, p 3)