September 2026 compliance digest
New regulator, updated notification requirements, and clearer excursion consent
September brought two changes affecting policy and practice. Here is the month at a glance, what each change means in practice, and what your service should take care of.
September at a glance
Regulator switch: complaints, serious incidents and child protection notifications now go to ERO, not the Ministry of Education.
Regular excursions: consent can now be agreed after enrolment, not only at enrolment.
The changes you need to know about
1. ERO is now your regulator
Responsibility for regulating early childhood education transferred from the Secretary for Education in the Ministry of Education to the Director of Regulation in the Education Review Office (ERO). The licensing criteria have been updated to reflect this change.
Services must check for out-of-date contacts and references in policy, procedure and forms. Complaints information, incident forms, and child protection records may also need to change so that staff and families know who to contact.
Note that ERO now receives and manages complaints relating to early learning services, and it is the contact for reporting incidents.
ERO explains its new role in Understanding our regulatory role in ECE and Kōhungahunga and is running webinars on the changes.
What your service should do
Update your concerns and complaints information, including the poster your families see, to list ERO as the contact.
Check serious incident forms for references to notifying the Ministry of Education, and replace these with ERO. This includes relevant injury, illness and incident forms, and notifications about missing children.
Update child protection concern forms to reflect that services must now notify ERO, rather than the Ministry of Education, when a formal report of concern is made to Oranga Tamariki or the Police. This changes who receives the regulatory notification – not who receives the report of concern.
ECEDocs has updated and reissued customer policies, posters and report templates. We’ve made the updates and notified customers about the practical actions for their service.
2. Regular excursions:consent can be given after enrolment
The licensing criteria now clarify that parents can agree to regular excursions at enrolment or later during their child’s enrolment. The clarification gives services a clearer basis for collecting consent after a child has enrolled. The excursion must still be part of an ongoing, planned, and consistent routine of education and care.
What your service should do
Review how you obtain and record permission for regular excursions. Consider using a separate regular excursion permission form, rather than relying solely on your enrolment form. A separate form can be used at any point during a child’s enrolment.
ECEDocs has updated our customer excursion policy wording to match the clarified definition. Our September advisory explained the change and highlights the practical option of a separate permission form.
Policy updates handled. Practical actions made clear.
Keeping up with sector changes means understanding both what needs to change in your documentation and what your team needs to do differently.
We take care of policy updates and explain the service-level actions - so you can spend less time working out what has changed and more time putting it into practice.
Our policy writers look for changes that affect compliance and update policies on behalf of services.
ECEDocs customers receive a simple explanation of important changes and the actions they need to take.
Changes are recorded in the platform - an important audit trail for good governance and ERO assessments.
